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THE ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 

COMPLETE. 

Collected and arranged, with an Introduction on her "Analysis 
of Motives." 

By NATHAN SHEPPARD. 

George Eliot is so well known, and so universally acknowledged as one of the best 
'writers of modern times, that it is not necessary to do more than to say that she was 
jthe author of these essays. Everybody of culture and taste wants to read whatever 
phe wrote. It may not be known by every one that she wrote many contributions to 
periodical literature, which, in style and interest, nothing in her works of Action excels. 
Ia general wish has been expressed through the press that her "striking essays be 
collected and reprinted, both because of substantive worth and because of the light 
they throw on the author's literary canons and predilections." This has now been 
done, and done by a gentleman in every respect fitted for the task. Prof. Sheppard 
'has also written an introduction to the essays on the author's "Analysis of Motives."' 
He is himself a recognized authority in critical analysis, and his introduction is worth 
many times the price of the volume. These essays are now collected for the first time, 
they never before having been published in book-form in either England or America. 



NATHAN 

SHEPPARD 




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THE ESSAYS 



OP 



GEOEGE ELIOT." 

COMPLETE. 



COLLECTED AND ARRANGED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION 
ON HER "ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES," 



BY 

NATHAN sheppakd, 

EDITOR OP "CHARACTER READINGS FROM GEORGE ELIOT," AND "THE DICKENS 
reader;" AND AUTHOR OP "8HUT UP IN PARIS." 



NEW YORK: 

FUNK & WAGNALLS, Publishers, 
10 and 12 Dey Street, 






Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by 

FUNK & WAGNALLS, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. 



CONTENTS. 



Preface, . . .... 

"George Eliot's'' Analysis of Motives, 
I. — Carlyle's Life of Sterling, . 
II. — Woman in France, 
III. — Evangelical Teaching, . 

IV. — German Wit, 

V. — Natural History of German Life, 
VI. — Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, 
VII. — Worldliness and Other- Worldliness, 
VIII. — The Influence of Rationalism, . 
IX. — The Grammar of Ornament, 
X. — Felix Holt's Address to Workingmen, 



PAGE 

5 

7 

25 

31 

64 

99 

141 

178 

205 

257 

272 

275 



PEEFAOE. 



Since the death of George Eliot much public curiosity has 
been excited by the repeated allusions to, and quotations from, 
her contributions to periodical literature, and a leading news- 
paper gives expression to a general wish when it says that 
" this series of striking essays ought to be collected and re- 
printed, both because of substantive worth and because of the 
light they throw on the author's literary canons and predilec- 
tions." In fact, the articles which were published anony- 
mously in The Westminster Review have been so pointedly 
designated by the editor, and the biographical sketch in the 
" Famous Women" series is so emphatic in its praise of them, 
and so copious in its extracts from one and the least important 
one of them, that the publication of all the Review and maga- 
zine articles of the renowned novelist, without abridgment or 
alteration, would seem but an act of fair play to her fame, 
while at the same time a compliance with a reasonable public 
demand. 

Nor are these first steps in her wonderful intellectual prog- 
ress any the less, but are all the more noteworthy, for being 
first steps. " To ignore this stage," says the author of the 
valuable little volume to which we have just referred — " to 
ignore this stage in George Eliot's mental development would 
be to lose one of the connecting links in her history." Fur- 



6 PREFACE. 

thermore, " nothing in her fictions excels the style of these 
papers." Here is all her " epigrammatic felicity," and an 
irony not surpassed by Heine himself, while her paper on the 
poet Young is one of her wittiest bits of critical analysis. 

Her translation of Strauss's " Life of Jesus" was published 
in 1846, and her translation of Feuerbach' s " Essence of Chris- 
tianity " in 1854. Her translation of Spinoza's "Ethics" 
was finished the same year, but remains unpublished. She 
was associate editor of The Westminster Review from 1851 to 
1853. She was about twenty-seven years of age when her first 
translation appeared, thirty-three when the first of these mag- 
azine articles appeared, thirty-eight at the publication of her 
first story, and fifty-nine when she finished " Theophrastus 
Such." Two years after she died, at the age of sixty-one. So 
that George Eliot's literary life covered a period of about 
thirty-two years. 

The introductory chapter on her " Analysis of Motives" 
first appeared as a magazine article, and appears here at the re- 
quest of the publishers, after having been carefully revised, in- 
deed almost entirely rewritten by its author. 



"GEORGE ELIOT'S" ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 



George Eliot is the greatest of the novelists in the deline- 
ation of feeling and the analysis of motives. In " uncovering 
certain human lots, and seeing how they are woven and inter- 
woven," some marvellous work has been done by this master in 
the two arts of rhetoric and fiction. 

If you say the telling of a story is her forte, you put her 
below Wilkie Collins or Mrs. Oliphant ; if you say her object 
is to give a picture of English society, she is surpassed by Bul- 
wer and Trollope ; if she be called a satirist of society, Thack- 
eray is her superior ; if she intends to illustrate the absurdity 
of behavior, she is eclipsed by Dickens ; but if the analysis of 
human motives be her forte and art, she stands first, and it is 
very doubtful whether any artist in fiction is entitled to stand 
second. She reaches clear in and touches the most secret and 
the most delicate spring of human action. She has done this 
so well, so apart from the doing of everything else, and so, in 
spite of doing some other things indifferently, that she works 
on a line quite her own, and quite alone, as a creative artist in 
fiction. Others have done this incidentally and occasionally, 
as Charlotte Bronte and Walter Scott, but George Eliot does 
it elaborately, with laborious painstaking, with purpose afore- 
thought. Scott said of Richardson : " In his survey of the 
heart he left neither head, bay, nor inlet behind him until he 
had traced its soundings, and laid it down in his chart with all 
its minute sinuosities, its depths and its shallows." 

This is too much to say of Richardson, but it is not too 
much to say of George Eliot. She has sounded depths and ex- 



s 



plored sinuosities of the human heart which were utterly un- 
known to the author of " Clarissa Harlowe." It is like look- 
ing into the translucent brook — you see the wriggling tad, the 
darting minnow, the leisurely trout, the motionless pike, while 
in the bays and inlets you see the infusoria and animalculae as 
well. 

George Eliot belongs to and is the greatest of the school of 
artists in fiction who write fiction as a means to an end, instead 
of as an end. And, while she certainly is not a story-teller of 
the first order, considered simply as a story-teller, her novels are 
a striking illustration of the power of fiction as a means to an 
end. They remind us, as few other stories do, of the fact that 
however inferior the story may be considered simply as a 
story, it is indispensable to the delineation of character. No 
other form of composition, no discourse, or essay, or series of 
independent sketches, however successful, could succeed in 
bringing out character equal to the novel. Herein is at once 
the justification of the power of fiction. " He spake a para- 
ble," with an " end " in view which could not be so expedi- 
tiously attained by any other form of address. 

A story of the first-class, with the story as end in itself, and 
a story of the first class told as a means to an end, has never 
been, and it is not likely ever will be, found together. The 
novel with a purpose is fatal to the novel written simply to 
excite by a plot, or divert by pictures of scenery, or entertain 
as a mere panorama of social life. So intense is George Eliot's 
desire to dissect the human heart and discover its motives, that 
plot, diction, situations, and even consistency in the vocabulary 
of the characters, are all made subservient to it. With her it 
is not so much that the characters do thus and so, but why 
they do thus and so. Dickens portrays the behavior, George 
Eliot dissects the motive of the behavior. Here comes the 
human creature, says Dickens, now let us see how he will 
behave. Here comes the human creature, says George Eliot," 
now let us see why he behaves. 

" Suppose," she says, " suppose we turn from outside esti- 



" GEORGE ELIOT S " ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 9 

mates of a man, to wonder with keener interest what is the re- 
port of his own consciousness about his doings, with what 
hindrances he is carrying on his daily Jabors, and with what 
spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which may one day 
be too heavy for him and bring his heart to a final pause." 
The outside estimate is the work of Dickens and Thackeray, the 
inside estimate is the work of George Eliot, 

Observe in the opening pages of the great novel of " Mid- 
dlemarch" how soon we pass from the outside dress to the in- 
side reasons for it, from the costume to the motives which con- 
trol it and color it. It was " only to close observers that 
Celia's dress differed from her sister's," and had " a shade 
of coquetry in its arrangements." Dorothea's " plain dress- 
ing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister 
shared." They were both influenced by " the pride of being 
ladies," of belonging to a stock not exactly aristocratic, but 
unquestionably "good." The very quotation of the word 
good is significant and suggestive. There were " no parcel- 
tying forefathers" in the Brooke pedigree. A Puritan fore- 
father, *' who served under Cromwell, but afterward conformed 
and managed to come out of all political troubles as the pro- 
prietor of a respectable family estate," had a hand in Doro- 
thea's " plain" wardrobe. " She could not reconcile the anx- 
ieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences with a 
keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery," but 
Celia " had that common-sense which is able to accept moment- 
ous doctrines without any eccentric agitation." Both were ex- 
amples of ' ' reversion. ' ' Then, as an instance of heredity work- 
ing itself out in character " in Mr. Brooke, the hereditary 
strain of Puritan energy was clearly in abeyance, but in his 
niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults and virtues." 

Could anything be more natural than for a woman with this 
passion for, and skill in, " unravelling certain human lots," to 
lay herself out upon the human lot of woman, with all her 
" passionate patience of genius ?" One would say this was in- 
evitable. And, for a delineation of what that lot of woman 



10 " GEORGE ELIOT'S' 7 ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 

really is, as made for her, there is nothing in all literature equal 
to what we find in " Middlemarch, " " Romola," " Daniel 
Deronda," and " Janet's Repentance. " " She was a woman, 
and could not make her own lot." Never before, indeed, was 
so much got out of the word " lot." Never was that little 
word so hard worked, or well worked. " We women," says 
Gwendolen Harleth, " must stay where we grow, or where the 
gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the 
flowers, to look as pretty as we can, and be dull without com- 
plaining. That is my notion about the plants, and that is the 
reason why some of them have got poisonous. " To appreciate 
the work that George Eliot has done you must read her 
with the determination of finding out the reason why Gwen- 
dolen Harleth " became poisonous," and Dorothea, with all 
her brains and " plans," a failure ; why " the many Theresas 
find for themselves no epic life, only a life of mistakes, the off- 
spring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the mean- 
ness of opportunity." You must search these marvellous 
studies in motives for the key to the blunders of " the blunder- 
ing lives" of woman which " some have felt are due to the in- 
convenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme power has 
fashioned the natures of women." But as there is not " one 
level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count 
three and no more, the social lot of woman cannot be treated 
with scientific certitude." It is treated with a dissective delinea- 
tion in the women of George Eliot unequalled in the pages of 
fiction. 

And then woman's lot, as respects her " social promotion" 
in matrimony, so much sought, and so necessary for her to seek, 
even in spite of her conscience, and at the expense of her hap- 
piness — the unravelling of that lot would also come very natural 
to this expert unraveller. And never have we had the causes 
of woman's " blunders" in match-making, and man's blunders 
in love-making, told with such analytic acumen, or with such 
pathetic and sarcastic eloquence. It is not far from the question 
of woman's social lot to the question of questions of human li&, 



"GEORGE ELIOT'S " ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 11 

the question which has so tremendous an influence upon the for- 
tunes of mankind and womankind, the question which it is so 
easy for one party to " pop" and so difficult for the other party 
to answer intelligently or sagaciously. 

Why does the young man fall in love with the young woman 
who is most unfit for him of all the young women of his ac- 
quaintance, and why does the young woman accept the young 
man, or the old man, who is better adapted to making her life 
unendurable than any other man of her circle of acquaintances ? 
Why does the stalwart Adam Bede fall in love with Hetty 
Sorrel, " who had nothing more than her beauty to recommend 
her ?" The delineator of his motives " respects him none the 
less." She thinks that " the deep love he had for that sweet, 
rounded, dark-eyed Hetty, of whose inward self he was really 
very ignorant, came out of the very strength of his nature, and 
not out of any inconsistent weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, 
to be wrought upon by exquisite music ? To feel its wondrous 
harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the 
delicate fibres of life which no memory can penetrate, and bind- 
ing together your whole being, past and present, in one un- 
speakable vibration ? If not, then neither is it a weakness to 
be so wrought upon by the exquisite curves of a woman's cheek, 
and neck, and arms ; by the liquid depth of her beseeching 
eyes, or the sweet girlish pout of her lips. For the beauty of 
a lovely woman is like music — what can one say more ?" And 
so " the noblest nature is often blinded to the character of the 
woman's soul that beauty clothes.'' Hence " the tragedy of 
human life is likely to continue for a long time to come, in 
spite of mental philosophers who are ready with the best re- 
ceipts for avoiding all mistakes of the kind." 

How simple the motive of the Rev. Edward Casaubon in 
popping the question to Dorothea Brooke, how complex her 
motives in answering the question ! He wanted an amanuensis 
to " love, honor, and obey" him. She wanted a husband who 
would be "a sort of father, and could teach you even 
Hebrew if you wished it." The matrimonial motives are 



12 "GEORGE ELIOT's" ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 

worked to draw out the character of Dorothea, and nowhere 
does the method of George Eliot show to greater advantage 
than in probing the motives of this fine, strong, conscientious, 
blundering young woman, whose voice '* was like the voice of 
a soul that once lived in an ^Eolian harp." She had a the- 
oretic cast of mind. She was " enamored of intensity and 
greatness, and rash in embracing what seemed to her to have 
those aspects." The awful divine had those aspects, and she 
embraced him. " Certainly such elements in the character of 
a marriageable girl tended to interfere with ,her lot, and 
hinder it from being decided, according to custom, by good 
looks, vanity, and merely canine affection." That's a George 
Eliot stroke. If the reader does not see from that what she is 
driving at he may as well abandon all hope of ever appreciat- 
ing her great forte and art. Dorothea's goodness and sincerity 
did not save her from the worst blunder that a woman can 
make, while her conscientiousness only made it inevitable. 
" With all her eagerness to know the truths of life she 
retained very childlike ideas about marriage." A little of 
the goose as well as the child in her conscientious simplicity, 
perhaps. She " felt sure she would have accepted the 
judicious Hooker if she had been born in time to save him 
from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony, or John 
Milton, when his blindness had come on, or any other great 
man whose odd habits it would be glorious piety to endure. 

True to life, our author furnishes the " great man," and the 
" odd habits," and the miserable years of " glorious" endur- 
ance. " Dorothea looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of 
Mr. Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected there every quality she 
herself brought." They exchanged experiences — he his desire 
to have an amanuensis, and she hers, to be one. He told her 
in the billy-cooing of their courtship that " his notes made a 
formidable range of volumes, but the crowning task would be 
to condense these voluminous, still accumulating results, and 
bring them, like the earlier vintage of Hippocratic books, to 
fit a little shelf." Dorothea was altogether captivated by the 



ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 13 

wide embrace of this conception. Here was something beyond 
the shallows of ladies' school literature. Here was a modern 
Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint. 
Dorothea said to herself : u His feeling, his experience, what 
a lake compared to my little pool !" The little pool runs into 
the great reservoir. 

Will you take this reservoir to be your husband, and will 
you promise to be unto him a fetcher of slippers, a dotter of 
I'sand crosser of T's and a copier and condenser of manuscripts 
until death doth you part ? I will. 

They spend their honeymoon in Rome, and on page 211 of 
Vol. I. we find poor Dorothea " alone in her apartments, 
sobbing bitterly, with such an abandonment to this relief of an 
oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled by pride will 
sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone." 
What was she crying about? "She thought her feeling of 
desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty." A 
characteristic George Eliot probe. Why does not Dorothea 
give the real reason for her desolateness ? Because she does 
not know what the real reason is — conscience makes blunderers 
of us all. " How was it that in the weeks since their marriage 
Dorothea had not distinctly observed, but felt, with a stifling 
depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she 
had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced 
by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead no 
whither ? I suppose it was because in courtship everything is 
regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest 
sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee 
delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will 
reveal. But, the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expecta- 
tion is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked 
on your marital voyage, you may become aware that you make 
no way, and that the sea is not within sight — that in fact you 
are exploring an inclosed basin. " So the ungauged reservoir 
turns out to be an inclosed basin, but Dorothea was prevented 
by her social lot, and perverse goodness, and puritanical 



14 "GEORGE ELIOT's" ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 



a 



reversion," from foreseeing that. She might have been 
saved from her gloomy marital voyage " if she could have fed 
her affection with those childlike caresses which are the bent 
of every sweet woman who has begun by showering kisses on 
the hard pate of her bald doll, creating a happy soul within 
that woodenness from the wealth of her own love." Then, 
perhaps, Ladislaw would have been her first husband instead of 
her second, as he certainly was her first and only love. Such 
are the chances and mischances in the lottery of matrimony. 

Equally admirable is the diagnosis of Gwendolen Harleth's 
motives in " drifting toward the tremendous decision," and 
finally landing in it. " We became poor, and I was tempted." 
Marriage came to her as it comes to many, as a temptation, 
and like the deadening drug or the maddening bowl, to keep 
off the demon of remorse or the cloud of sorrow, like the 
forgery or the robbery to save from want. " The brilliant 
position she had longed for, the imagined freedom she would 
create for herself in marriage" — these " had come to her 
hunger like food, with the taint of sacrilege upon it," which 
she " snatched with terror." Grandcourt " fulfilled his side 
of the bargain by giving her the rank and luxuries she coveted." 
Matrimony as a bargain never had and never will have but one 
result. " She had a root of conscience in her, and the process 
of purgatory had begun for her on earth." Without the root 
of conscience it would have been purgatory all the same. So 
much for resorting to marriage for deliverance from poverty or 
old-maidhood. j Better be an old maid than an old fool^ But 
how are we to be guaranteed against " one of those convulsive 
motiveless actions by which wretched men and women leap 
from a temporary sorrow into a lifelong misery " ? Rosamond 
Lydgate says, ' ' Marriage stays with us like a murder. ' ' Yes, 
if she could only have found that out before instead of after 
her own marriage ! 

But " what greater thing," exclaims our novelist, " is there 
for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life, 
to strengthen each other in all labor, to minister to each other 



"GEORGE ELIOT's" ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 15 

in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable 
memories at the last parting ?" 

While a large proportion of her work in the analysis of 
motives is confined to woman, she has done nothing more 
skilful or memorable than the " unravelling" of Bulstrode's 
mental processes by which he " explained the gratification of 
his desires into satisfactory agreement with his beliefs." If 
there were no Dorothea in " Middlemarch" the character of 
Bulstrode would give that novel a place by itself among the 
masterpieces of fiction. The Bulstrode wound was never 
probed in fiction with more scientific precision. The pious 
villain finally finds himself so near discovery that he becomes 
conscientious. " His equivocation now turns venomously upon 
him with the full-grown fang of a discovered lie." The past 
came back to make the present unendurable. " The terror of 
being judged sharpens the memory." Once more "he saw 
himself the banker's clerk, as clever in figures as he was fluent 
in speech, and fond of theological definition. He had striking 
experience in conviction and sense of pardon ; spoke in prayer- 
meeting and on religious platforms. That was the time he 
would have chosen now to awake in and find the rest of dream. 
He remembered his first moments of shrinking. They were 
private and were filled with arguments — some of these taking 
the form of prayer. 

Private prayer — but "is private prayer necessarily candid ? 
Does it necessarily go to the roots of action ? Private prayer 
is inaudible speech, and speech is representative. Who can 
represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections ?" 

Bulstrode's course up to the time of his being suspected 
" had, he thought, been sanctioned by remarkable providences, 
appearing to point the way for him to be the agent in mak- 
ing the best use of a large property." Providence would 
have him use for the glory of God the money he had stolen. 
" Could it be for God's service that this fortune should go to" 
its rightful owners, when its rightful owners were " a young 
woman and her husband who were given up to the lightest 



16 "GEORGE ELIOT'S" ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 

pursuits, and might scatter it abroad in triviality — people who 
seemed to lie outside the path of remarkable piovidences ?" 

Bulstrode felt at times "that his action was unrighteous, 
but how could he go back ? He had mental exercises calling him- 
self naught, laid hold on redemption and went on in his course 
of instrumentality. He was " carrying on two distinct lives" 
— a religious one and a wicked one. " His religious activity 
could not be incompatible with his wicked business as soon as 
he had argued himself into not feeling it incompatible." 

" The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. 
There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs 
and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode 
was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires 
had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had 
gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satis- 
factory agreement with those beliefs." 

And now Providence seemed to be taking sides against him. 
" A threatening Providence — in other words, a public exposure 
— urged him to a kind of propitiation which was not a doc- 
trinal transaction. The divine tribunal had changed its aspect 
to him. Self -prostration was no longer enough. He must 
bring restitution in his hand. By what sacrifice could he stay 
the rod ? He believed that if he did something right God 
would stay the rod, and save him from the consequences of his 
wrong-doing." His religion was "the religion of personal 
fear," which " remains nearly at the level of the savage." 
The exposure comes, and the explosion. Society shudders with 
hypocritical horror, especially in the presence of poor Mrs. 
Bulstrode, who " should have some hint given her, that if she 
knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bon- 
net. " Society when it is very candid, and very conscientious, 
and very scrupulous, cannot " allow a wife to remain ignorant 
long that the town holds a bad opinion of her husband." The 
photograph of the Middlemarch gossips sitting upon the case 
of Mrs. Bulstrode is taken accurately. Equally accurate, and 
far more impressive, is the narrative of circumstantial evidence 



"GEORGE ELIOT'S" ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 17 

gathering against the innocent Lydgate and the guilty Bul- 
strode — circumstances that will sometimes weave into one 
tableau of publie odium the purest and the blackest characters. 
From this tableau you may turn to that one in " Adam Bede," 
and see how circumstances are made to crush the weak woman 
and clear the wicked man. And then you can go to 
" Romola," or indeed to almost any of these novels, and see 
how wrong-doing may come of an indulged infirmity of 
purpose, that unconscious weakness and conscious wickedness 
may bring about the same disastrous results, and that repent- 
ance has no more effect in averting or altering the consequences 
in one case than the other. Tito's ruin comes of a feeble, 
Felix Holt's victory of an unconquerable, will. Nothing is 
more characteristic of George Eliot than her tracking of Tito 
through all the motives and counter motives from which he 
acted. " Because he tried to slip away from everything that 
was unpleasant, and cared for nothing so much as his own 
safety, he came at last to commit such deeds as make a man 
infamous." So poor Romola tells her son, as a warning, and 
adds : " If you make it the rule of your life to escape from 
what is disagreeable, calamity may come just the same, and it 
would be calamity falling on a base mind, which is the one 
form of sorrow that has no balm in it." 

Out of this passion for the analysis of motives comes the 
strong character, slightly gnarled and knotted by natural 
circumstances, as trees that are twisted and misshapen by 
storms and floods — or characters gnarled by some interior force 
working in conjunction with or in opposition to outward 
circumstances. She draws no monstrosities, or monsters, thus 
avoiding on the one side romance and on the other burlesque. 
She keeps to life — the life that fails from " the meanness of 
opportunity," or is " dispersed among hindrances," or 
" wrestles" unavailingly " with universal pressure." 

Why had Mr. Gilfil in those late years of his beneficent life 
" more of the knots and ruggedness of poor human nature than 
there lay any clear hint of it in the open-eyed, loving" young 



18 "GEORGE ELIOT's" ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 

Maynard ? Because " it is with men as with trees : if you lop 
off their finest branches into which they were pouring their 
young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some 
rough boss, some odd excrescence, and what might have been 
a grand tree, expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical, 
misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely 
oddity, has come of a hard sorrow which has crushed and 
maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous 
beauty ; and the trivial, erring life, which we visit with our 
harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man 
whose best limb is withered. The dear old Vicar had been 
sketched out by nature as a noble tree. The heart of him 
was sound, the grain was of the finest, and in the gray-haired 
man, with his slipshod talk and caustic tongue, there was the 
main trunk of the same brave, faithful, tender nature that had 
poured out the finest, freshest forces of its life-current in a 
first and only love." 

Her style is influenced by her purpose — may be said, indeed, 
to be created by it. The excellences and the blemishes of the 
diction come of the end sought to be attained by it. Its 
subtleties and obscurities were equally inevitable. Analytical 
thinking takes on an analytical phraseology. It is a striking- 
instance of a mental habit creating a vocabulary. The method 
of thought produces the form of rhetoric. Some of the 
sentences are mental landscapes. The meaning seems to be in 
motion on the page. It is elusive from its very subtlety. It 
is more our analyst than her character of Ruf us Lyon, who 
" would fain find language subtle enough to follow the utmost 
intricacies of the soul's pathways." Mrs. Transome's " lancet- 
edged epigrams" are dull in comparison with her own. She 
uses them with startling success in dissecting motive and 
analyzing feeling. They deserve as great renown as " Ne- 
kton's probe." 

For example : : u Examine your words well, and you will find 
that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard 
thing to say the exact truth, especially about your own feelings 



"GEORGE ELIOT'S " ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 19 

— much harder than to say something fine about them which 
is not the exact truth. '^ That ought to make such a revelation 
of the religious diary-keeper to himself as to make him 
ashamed of himself. And this will fit in here : " Our con- 
sciences are not of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of 
fixed laws — they are the voice of sensibilities as various as our 
memories ;" and this : " Every strong feeling makes to itself 
a conscience of its own — has its own piety." 

Who can say that the joints of his armor are not open to 
this thrust ? " The lapse of time during which a given event 
has not happened is in the logic of habit, constantly alleged as 
a reason why the event should never happen, even when the 
lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the 
event imminent. A man will tell you that he worked in a 
mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he 
should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to 
sink. ' ' Silas Marner lost his money through his * ' sense of 
security," which " more frequently springs from habit than 
conviction.'' He went unrobbed for fifteen years, which 
supplied the only needed condition for his being robbed now. 
A compensation for stupidity : *' If we had a keen vision 
and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing 
the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die 
of that roar that lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the 
quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity." Who 
does not at once recognize " that mixture of pushing forward 
and being pushed forward" as "the brief history of most 
human beings ?" Who has not seen " advancement hindered 
by impetuous candor ?" or " private grudges christened by the 
name of public zeal ?" or " a church built with an exuberance 
of faith and a deficiency of funds ?" or a man " who would 
march determinedly along the road he thought best, but who 
was easily convinced which was best ?" or a preacher " whose 
oratory was like a Belgian railway horn, which shows praise- 
worthy intentions inadequately fulfilled ?" 

There is something chemical about such an analysis as this 



20 "GEORGE ELIOT'S" ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 

of Rosamond : " Every nerve and muscle was adjusted to the 
consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by- 
nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique. 
She even acted her own character, and so well that she did not 
know it to be precisely her own ! " Nor is the exactness of 
this any less cruel : " We may handle extreme opinions with 
impunity, while our furniture and our dinner-giving link us to 
the established order." Why not own that " the emptiness of 
all things is never so striking to us as when we fail in them ?" 
Is it not better to avoid " following great reformers beyond 
the threshold of their own homes V Does not " our moral 
sense learn the manners of good society V 

The lancet works impartially, because the hand that holds it 
is the hand of a conscientious artist. She will endure the 
severest test you can apply to an artist in fiction. She does 
not betray any religious bias in her novels, which is all the more 
remarkable now that we find it in these essays. Nor is it at all 
remarkable that this bias is so very easily discovered in the 
novels by those who have found it in her essays ! Whatever 
opinions she may have expressed in her critical reviews, she is 
not the Evangelical, or the Puritan, or the Jew, or the 
Methodist, or the Dissenting Minister, or the Churchman, any 
more than she is the Radical, the Liberal, or the Tory, who 
talks in the pages of her fiction. 

Every side has its say, every prejudice its voice, and every 
prejudice and side and vagary even has the philosophical reason 
given for it, and the charitable explanation applied to it. She 
analyzes the religious motives without obtrusive criticism or 
acrid cynicism or nauseous cant — whether of the orthodox or 
heretical form. 

The art of fiction has nothing more elevated, or more 
touching, or fairer to every variety of religious experience, 
than the delineation of the motives that actuated Dinah Mor- 
ris the Methodist preacher, Deronda the Jew, Dorothea the 
Puritan, Adam and Seth Bede, and Janet Dempster. 

Who can object to this ? " Religious ideas have the fate of 



" GEORGE ELIOT S'' ANALYSIS OE MOTIVES. 21 

melodies, which , once set afloat in the world, are taken up by 
all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, 
or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the 
melody itself is detestable." Is it not one of the " mixed 
results of revivals" that " some gain a religious vocabulary 
rather than a religious experience ?" Is there a descendant of 
the Puritans who will not relish the fair play of this ? " They 
might give the name of piety to much that was only Puritanic 
egoism ; they might call many things sin that were not sin, 
but they had at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and 
resisted, and color-blindness, which may mistake drab for scar- 
let, is better than total blindness, which sees no distinction of 
color at all." Is not Adam Bede justified in saying that " to 
hear some preachers you'd think a man must be doing nothing 
all his life but shutting his eyes and looking at what's going on 
in the inside of him," or that " the doctrines are like finding 
names for your feelings so that you can talk of them when 
you've never known them ?" Read all she has said before you 
object to anything she has said. Then see whether you will 
find fault with her for delineatiug the motives of those with 
whom " great illusions" are mistaken for " great faith ;" of 
those " whose celestial intimacies do not improve their domes- 
tic manners," however " holy" they may claim to be ; of 
those who " contrive to conciliate the consciousness of filthy 
rags with the best damask ;" of those " whose imitative piety 
and native worldliness is equally sincere ;" of those who 
" think the invisible powers will be soothed by a bland paren- 
thesis here and there, coming from a man of property" — paren- 
thetical recognition of the Almighty ! May not " religious 
scruples be like spilled needles, making one afraid of treading 
or sitting down, or even eating ?" 

But if this is a great mind fascinated with the insoluble 
enigma of human motives, it is a mind profoundly in sympathy 
with those who are puzzling hopelessly over the riddle or are 
struggling hopelessly in its toils. She is " on a level and in 
the press with them as they struggle their way along the stony 



22 "GEORGE ELIOT's" ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 

road through the crowd of unloving fellow-men. She says " the 
only true knowledge of our fellows is that which enables us to 
feel with them, which gives us a finer ear for the heart-pulses 
that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and 
opinion." No artist in fiction ever had a finer ear or a more 
human sympathy for the straggler who " pushes manfully on" 
and " falls at last," leaving " the crowd to close over the space 
he has left. " Her extraordinary skill in disclosing " the pecul- 
iar combination of outward with inward facts which constitute 
a man's critical actions," only makes her the more charitable 
in judging them. " Until we know what this combination has 
been, or will be, it will be better not to think ourselves wise 
about' ' the character that results. ' ' There is a terrible coer- 
cion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a 
deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change. And for this 
reason the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of 
the only practicable right." There is nothing of the spirit of 
" served him right," or " just what she deserved," or " they 
ought to have known better," in George Eliot. That is not in 
her line. The opposite of that is exactly in her line. This is 
characteristic of her : " In this world there are so many of 
these common, coarse people, who have no picturesque or sen- 
timental wretchedness ! And it is so needful we should re- 
member their existence, else we may happen to leave them 
quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theo- 
ries which only fit a world of extremes." She does not leave 
them out. Her books are full of them, and of a Christly charity 
and plea for them. Who can ever forget little Tiny, " hidden 
and uncared for as the pulse of anguish in the breast of the 
bird that has fluttered down to its nest with the long-sought 
food, and has found the nest torn and empty?" There is 
nothing in fiction to surpass in pathos the picture of the death 
of Mrs. Amos Barton. George Eliot's fellow-feeling comes of 
the habit she ascribes to Daniel Deronda, " the habit of think- 
ing herself imaginatively into the experience of others." That 
is the reason why her novels come home so pitilessly to those who 



"GEORGE ELIOT'S " ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES. 23 

have had a deep experience of human life. These are the men 
and women whom she fascinates and alienates. I know strong 
men and brave women who are afraid of her books, and say 
so. It is because of her realness, her unrelenting fidelity to 
human nature and human life. It is because the analysis is so 
delicate, subtle, and far-in. Hence the atmosphere of sadness 
that pervades her pages. It was unavoidable. To see only the 
behavior, as Dickens did, amuses us ; to study only the motive 
at the root of the behavior, as George Eliot does, saddens us. 
The humor of Mrs. Poyser and the wit of Mrs. Transome only 
deepen the pathos by relieving it. There is hardly a sarcasm 
in these books but has its pensive undertone. 

It is all in the key of "Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie 
Doon," and that would be an appropriate key for a requiem 
over the grave of George Eliot. 

All her writings are now before the world, and are accessible 
to all. They have taken their place, and will keep their place, 
high among the writings of those of our age who have made 
that age illustrious in the history of the English tongue. 



THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 



L 



CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING. 

As soon as the closing of the Great Exhibition afforded a 
reasonable hope that there would once more be a reading pub- 
lic, " The Life of Sterling" appeared. A new work by Carlylc 
must always be among the literary births eagerly chronicled by 
the journals and greeted by the public. In a book of such 
parentage we care less about the subject than about its treat- 
ment, just as we think the " Portrait of a Lord" worth study- 
ing if it come from the pencil of a Vandyck. The life of John 
Sterling, however, has intrinsic interest, even if it be viewed 
simply as the struggle of a restless aspiring soul, yearning to 
leave a distinct impress of itself on the spiritual development of 
humanity, with that fell disease which, with a refinement of 
torture, heightens the susceptibility and activity of the facul- 
ties, wbile it undermines their creative force. Steiling, more- 
over, was a man thoroughly in earnest, to whom poetry and 
philosophy were not merely another form of paper currency or 
a ladder to fame, but an end in themselves — one of those finer 
spirits with whom, amid the jar and hubbub of our daily life, 

" The melodies abide 
Of the everlasting chime." 



26 



But his intellect was active and rapid, rather than powerful, 
and in all his writings we feel the want of a stronger electric 
current to give that vigor of conception and felicity of expres- 
sion, by which we distinguish the undefinable something called 
genius ; while his moral nature, though refined and elevated, 
seems to have been subordinate to his intellectual tendencies 
and social qualities, and to have had itself little determining in- 
fluence on his life. His career was less ..exceptional than his 
character : a youth marked by delicate health and studious 
tastes, a short-lived and not very successful share in the man- 
agement of the Athenceum, a fever of sympathy with Spanish 
patriots, arrested before it reached a dangerous crisis by an 
early love affair ending in marriage, a fifteen months' residence 
in the West Indies, eight months of curate's duty at Herst- 
monceux, relinquished on the ground of failing health, and 
through his remaining yeais a succession of migrations to the 
South in search of a friendly climate, with the occasional pub- 
lication of an " article," a tale, or a poem in Blackwood or 
elsewhere — this, on the prosaic background of an easy compe- 
tence, was what made up the outer tissue of Sterling's exist- 
ence. The impression of his intellectual power on his per- 
sonal friends seems to have been produced chiefly by the elo- 
quence and brilliancy of his conversation ; but the mere reader 
of his works and letters would augur from them neither the 
wit nor the curiosa feliciias of epithet and imagery, which 
would rank him with the men whose sayings are thought worthy 
of perpetuation in books of table-talk and " ana." The pub- 
lic, then, since it is content to do without biographies of much 
more remarkable men, cannot be supposed to have felt any 
pressing demand even for a single life of Sterling ; still less, it 
might be thought, when so distinguished a writer as Arch- 
deacon Hare had furnished this, could there be any need for 
another. But, in opposition to the majority of Mr. Carlyle's 
critics, we agree with him that the first life is properly the 
justification of the second. Even among the readers personally 
unacquainted with Sterling, tlio&o who sympathized with his 



carlyle's life op sterling. 27 

ultimate alienation from the Church, rather than with his 
transient conformity, were likely to be dissatisfied with the en- 
tirely apologetic tone of Hare's life, which, indeed, is con- 
fessedly an incomplete presentation of Sterling's mental course 
after his opinions diverged from those of his clerical biogra- 
pher ; while those attached friends (and Sterling possessed the 
happy magic that secures many such) who knew him best dur- 
ing this latter part of his career, would naturally be pained to 
have it represented, though only by implication, as a sort of 
deepening declension ending in a virtual retraction. Of such 
friends Carlyle was the most eminent, and perhaps the most 
highly valued, and, as co-trustee with Archdeacon Hare of 
Sterling's literary character and writings, he felt a kind of re- 
sponsibility that no mistaken idea of his departed friend should 
remain before the world without correction. Evidently, how- 
ever, his " Life of Sterling" was not so much the conscientious 
discharge of a trust as a labor of love, and to this is owing its 
strong charm. Carlyle here shows us his " sunny side." We 
no longer see him breathing out threatenings and slaughter as 
in the Latter-Day Pamphlets, but moving among the charities 
and amenities of life, loving and beloved — a Teufelsdrockh 
still, but humanized by a Blumine worthy of him. We have 
often wished that genius would incline itself more frequently 
to the task of the biographer— that when some great or good 
personage dies, instead of the dreary three or five vol timed 
compilations of letter, and diary, and detail, little to the pur- 
pose, which two thirds of the reading public have not the 
chance, nor the other third the inclination, to read, we could 
have a real " Life," setting forth briefly and vividly the man's 
inward and outward struggles, aims, and achievements, so as to 
make clear the meaning which his experience has for his fel 
lows. A few such lives (chiefly, indeed, autobiographies) the 
world possesses, and they have, perhaps, been more influential 
on the formation of character than any other kind of reading. 
But the conditions required for the perfection of life writing — 
personal intimacy, a loving and poetic nature which sees the 



28 THE ESSAYS OF " GEOKGE ELIOT." 

beauty and the depth of familiar things, and the artistic power 
which seizes characteristic points and renders them with life- 
like effect — are seldom found in combination. " The Life of 
Sterling" is an instance of this rare conjunction. Its compara- 
tively tame scenes and incidents gather picturesqueness and in- 
terest under the rich lights of Carlyle's mind. We are told 
neither too little nor too much ; the facts noted, the letters 
selected, are all such as serve to give the liveliest conception of 
what Sterling was and what he did ; and though the book 
speaks much of other persons, this collateral matter is all a kind 
of scene painting, and is accessory to the main purpose. The 
portrait of Coleridge, for example, is precisely adapted to bring 
before us the intellectual region in which Sterling lived for 
some time before entering the Church. Almost every review 
has extracted this admirable description, in which genial vene- 
ration and compassion struggle with irresistible satire ; but the 
emphasis of quotation cannot be too often given to the follow- 
ing pregnant paragraph : 

" The truth is, I now see Coleridge's talk and speculation was the 
emblem of himself. In it, as in him, a ray of heavenly inspiration 
struggled, in a tragically ineffectual degree, with the weakness of 
flesh and blood. He says once, he ' had skirted the howling deserts 
of infidelity.' This was evident enough ; but he had not had the 
courage, in defiance of pain and terror, to press resolutely across said 
deserts to the new firm lands of faith beyond ; he preferred to create 
logical fata-morganas for himself on this hither side, and laboriously 
solace himself with these. " 

The above mentioned step of Sterling — his entering the 
Church — is the point on which Carlyle is most decidedly at 
issue with Archdeacun Hare. The latter holds that had Ster- 
ling's health permitted him to remain in the Church, he would 
have escaped those aberrations from orthodoxy, which, in the 
clerical view, are to be regarded as the failure and shipwreck of 
his career, appparently thinking, like that friend of Arnold's 
who recommended a curacy as the best means of clearing up 
Trinitarian difficulties, that " orders" are a sort of spiritual 



29 



backboard, which, by dint of obliging a man to look as if he 
were strait, end by making him so. According to Carlyle, on 
the contrary, the real " aberration" of Sterling was his choice 
of the clerical profession, which was simply a mistake as to 
his true vocation : 

" Sterling," he says, "was not intrinsically, nor had ever been in 
the highest or chief degree, a devotional mind. Of course all excel- 
lence in man, and worship as the supreme excellence, was part of 
the inheritance of this gifted man ; but if called to define him, I 
should say artist, not saint, was the real bent of his being. " 

Again : 

"No man of Sterling's veracity, had he clearly consulted his own 
heart, or had his own heart been capable of clearly responding, and 
not been bewildered by transient fantasies and theosophic moon- 
shine, could have undertaken this function. His heart would have 
answered, ' No, thou canst not. What is incredible to thee, thou 
shalt not, at thy soul's peril, attempt to believe ! Elsewhither for a 
refuge, or die here. Go to perdition if thou must, but not with a lie 
in thy mouth ; by the eternal Maker, no ! ' " 

From the period when Carlylc's own acquaintance with Ster- 
ling commenced, the Life has a double interest, from the 
glimpses it gives us of the writer, as well as of his hero. We are 
made present at their first introduction to each other ; we get 
a lively idea of their colloquies and walks together, and in this 
easy way, without any heavy disquisition or narrative, we obtain 
a clear insight into Sterling's character and mental progress. 
Above all, we are gladdened with a perception of the affinity 
that exists between noble souls, in spite of diversity in ideas — 
in what Carlyle calls " the logical outcome" of the faculties. 
This " Life of Sterling" is a touching monument of the capa- 
bility human nature possesses of the highest love, the love of 
the good and beautiful in character, which is, after all, the es- 
sence of piety. The style of the work, too, is for the most 
part at once pure and rich ; there are passages of derp pathos 
which come upon the reader like a strain of solemn music, and 



30 THE ESSAYS OF " GEOiiGE ELIOT." 

others which show that aptness of epithet, that masterly power 
of close delineation, in which, perhaps, no writer has excelled 
Carlyle. 

We have said that we think this second " Life of Sterling" 
justified by the first ; but were it not so, the book would 
justify itself. 



II. 

WOMAN IN FRANCE : MADAME DE SABLE.* 

In 1847, a certain Count Leopold Ferri died at Padua, 
leaving a library entirely composed of works written by women, 
in various languages, and tbis library amounted to nearly 
32,000 volumes. We will not hazard any conjecture as to the 
proportion of these volumes which a severe judge, like the 
priest in Don Quixote, would deliver to the flames, but for our 
own part, most of these we should care to rescue would be the 
works of French women. With a few remarkable exceptions, 
our own feminine literature is made up of books which could 
have been better written by men — books which have the same 
relation to literature is general, as academic prize poems have 
to poetry : when not a feeble imitation, they are usually an 
absurd exaggeration of the masculine style, like the swaggering 
gait of a bad actress in male attire. Few English women have 
written so much like a woman as Richardson's Lady G. Now 
we think it an immense mistake to maintain that there is no 
sex in literature. Science has no sex : the mere knowing and 
reasoning faculties, if they act correctly, must go through the 
same process, and arrive at the same result. But in art and 
literature, which imply the action of the entire being, in which 
every fibre of the nature is engaged, in which every peculiar 
modification of the individual makes itself felt, woman has 
something specific to contribute. Under every imaginable 

* 1. " Madame de Sable. Etudes sur les Femmos illustres et la 
Societe du XVII e siecle." Par M.Victor Cousin. Paris: Didier. 

2. " Portraits de Femmes. " Par C. A. Sainte-Beuve. Paris : Didier. 

3. " Les Femmes de la Revolutions." Par J. Michelet. 



32 THE ESSAYS OF 

social condition, she will necessarily have a class of sensations 
and emotions — the maternal ones — which must remain unknown 
to man ; and the fact of her comparative physical weakness, 
which, however it may have been exaggerated by a vicious 
civilization, can never be cancelled, introduces a distinctively 
feminine condition into the wondrous chemistry of the affec- 
tions and sentiments, which inevitably gives rise to distinctive 
forms and combinations. A certain amount of psychological 
difference between man and woman necessarily arises out of 
the difference of sex, and instead of being destined to vanish 
before a complete development of woman's intellectual and 
moral nature, will be a permanent source of variety and 
beauty as long as the tender light and dewy freshness of morn- 
ing affect us differently from the strength and brilliancy of the 
midday sun. And those delightful women of France, who 
from the beginning of the seventeenth to the close of the 
eighteenth century, formed some of the brightest threads in 
the web of political and literary history, wrote under circum- 
stances which left' the feminine character of their minds un- 
cramped by timidity, and unstrained by mistaken effoit. 
They were not trving to make a career for themselves ; they 
thought little, in many cases not at all, of the public ; they 
wrote letters to their lovers and friends, memoirs of their every- 
day lives, romances in which they gave portraits of their familiar 
acquaintances, and described the tragedy or comedy which was 
going on before their eyes. Always refined and graceful, often 
witty, sometimes judicious, they wrote what they saw, thought, 
and felt in their habitual language, without proposing any 
model to themselves, without any intention to prove that 
women could write as well as men, without affecting manly 
views or suppressing womanly ones. One may say, at least 
with regard to the women of the seventeenth century, that 
their writings were but a charming accident of their more 
charming lives, like the petals which the wind shakes from the 
rose in its bloom. And it is but a twin fact with this, that in 
France alone woman has had a vital influence on the develop- 



WOMAN IK FBAKCE : MADAME DE SABLE. 33 

raent of literature ; in France alone the mind of woman has 
passed like an electric current through the language, making 
crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred ; in 
France alone, if the writings of women were swept away, a 
serious gap would be made in the national history. 

Patriotic gallantry may perhaps contend that English women 
could, if they had liked, have written as well as their neigh- 
bors ; but we will leave the consideration of that question to 
the reviewers of the literature that might have been. In the 
literature that actually is, we must turn to France for the 
highest examples of womanly achievement in almost every 
department. We confess ourselves unacquainted with the 
productions of those awful women of Italy, who held profes- 
sorial chairs, and were great in civil and canon law ; we have 
made no researches into the catacombs of female literature, but 
we think we may safely conclude that they would yield no 
rivals to that which is still unburied ; and here, we suppose, 
the question of pre-eminence can only lie between England and 
France. And to this day, Madame dc Sevigne remains the 
single instance of a woman who is supreme in a class of liter- 
ature which has engaged the ambition of men ; Madame 
Dacier still reigns the queen of blue stockings, though women 
have long studied Greek without shame ;* Madame de Stael's 
name still rises first to the lips when we are asked to mention 
a woman of great intellectual power; Madame Roland is still 
the unrivalled type of the sagacious and sternly heroic, yet 
lovable woman ; George Sand is the unapproached artist who, 
to Jean Jacques' eloquence and deep sense of external nature, 
unites the clear delineation of character and the tragic depth of 
passion. These great names, which mark different epochs, soar 
like tall pines amidst a forest of less conspicuous, but not less 
fascinating, female writers ; and beneath these, again, are 

* Queen Christina, when Mme. Dacier (then Mile. Le Fevre) sent 
her a copy of her edition of " Callimachus, " wrote in reply : " Mais 
vous, de qui on m 'assure que vous otes une belle et agreable fille, 
n'avez vous pas honte d'etre si savante ?" 



34 THE ESSAYS OF 

spread, like a thicket of hawthorns, eglantines, and honey- 
suckles, the women who are known rather by what they stim- 
ulated men to write, than by what they wrote themselves — the 
women whose tact, wit, and personal radiance created the 
atmosphere of the Salon, where literature, philosophy, and 
science, emancipated from the trammels of pedantry and 
technicality, entered on a brighter stage of existence. 

What were the causes of this earlier development and more 
abundant manifestation of womanly intellect in France ? The 
primary one, perhaps, lies in the physiological characteristics 
of the Gallic race — the small brain and vivacious temperament 
which permit the fragile system of woman to sustain the 
superlative, activity requisite for intellectual creativeness ; 
while, on the other hand, the larger brain and slower temper- 
ament of the English and Germans are, in the womanly 
organization, generally dreamy and passive. The type of 
humanity in the latter may be grander, but it requires a larger 
sum of conditions to produce a perfect specimen. Throughout 
the animal world, the higher the organization, the more fre- 
quent is the departure from the normal form ; we do not often 
see imperfectly developed or ill-made insects, but we rarely see 
a perfectly developed, well-made man. And thus the physique 
of a woman may suffice as the substratum for a superior Gallic 
mind, but is too thin a soil for a superior Teutonic one. Our 
theory is borne out by the fact that among our own country- 
women those who distinguish themselves by literary production 
more frequently approach the Gallic than the Teutonic type ; 
they are intense and rapid rather than comprehensive. The wom- 
an of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of 
ideas ; her physical conditions refuse to support the energy re- 
quired for spontaneous activity ; the voltaic-pile is not strong 
enough to produce crystallizations ; phantasms of great ideas 
float through her mind, but she has not the spell which will arrest 
them, and give them fixity. This, more than unfavorable 
external circumstances, is, we think, the reason why woman 
has not yet contributed any new form to art, any discovery in 



WOMAN" IN FRANCE : MADAME DE SABLE\ 35 

science, any deep-searching inquiry in philosophy. The 
necessary physiological conditions are not present in her. 
That under more favorable circumstances in the future, these 
conditions may prove compatible with the feminine organiza- 
tion, it would be rash to deny. For the present, we are only 
concerned with our theory so far as it presents a physiological 
basis for the intellectual effectiveness of French women. 

A secondary cause was probably the laxity of opinion and 
practice with regard to the marriage-lie. Heaven forbid that 
we should enter on a defence of French morals, most of all in 
relation to marriage ! But it is undeniable that unions formed 
in the maturity of thought and feeling, and grounded only on 
inherent fitness and mutual attraction, tended to bring women 
into more intelligent sympathy with men, and to heighten and 
complicate their share in the political drama. The quiescence 
and security of the conjugal relation arc doubtless favorable to 
the manifestation of the highest qualities by persons who have 
already attained a high standard of culture, but rarely foster a 
passion sufficient to rouse all the faculties to aid in winning or 
retaining its beloved object — to convert indohnce into activity, 
indifference into aident partisanship, dulness into perspicuity. 
Gallantry and intrigue are sorry enough things in themselves, 
but they certainly serve better to arouse the dormant faculties 
of woman than embroidery and domestic drudgery, especially 
when, as in the high society of France in the seventeenth 
century, they are refined by the influence of Spanish chivalry, 
and controlled by the spirit of Italian causticity. The dreamy 
and fantastic girl was awakened to reality by the experience of 
wifehood and maternity, and became capable of loving, not a 
mere phantom of her own imagination, but a living man, 
struggling with the hatreds and rivalries of the political arena ; 
she espoused his quarrels, she made herself, her fortune, and 
her inflnence, the stepping-stones of his ambition ; and the 
languid beauty, who had formerly seemed ready to " die of 
a rose," was seen to become the heroine of an insurrection. 
The vivid interest in affairs which was thus excited in woman 



36 THE ESSAYS OE 

must obviously have tended to quicken her intellect, and give 
it a practical application ; and the very sorrows — the heart- 
pangs and regrets which are inseparable from a life of passion 
— deepened her nature by the questioning of self and destiny 
which they occasioned, and by the energy demanded to sur- 
mount them and live on. No wise person, we imagine, wishes 
to restore the social condition of France in the seventeenth 
century, or considers the ideal programme of woman's life to 
be a manage de convenance at fifteen, a career of gallantry from 
twenty to eight-and-thirty, and penitence and piety for the 
rest of her days. Nevertheless, that social condition has its 
good results, as much as the madly superstitious Crusades had 
theirs. 

But the most indisputable source of feminine culture and 
development in France was the influence of the salons, which, 
as all the world knows, were reunions of both sexes, where 
conversation ran along the whole gamut of subjects, from the 
frothiest vers de societe to the philosophy of Descartes. 
Richelieu had set the fashion of uniting a taste for letters 
with the habits of polite society and the pursuits of ambition ; 
and in the first quarter of the seventeenth century there were 
already several hotels in Paris, varying in social position from 
the closest proximity of the Court to the debatable ground of 
the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, which served as a ren- 
dezvous for different circles of people, bent on entertaining 
themselves either by showing talent or admiring it. The most 
celebrated of these rendezvous was the Hotel de Rambouillet, 
which was at the culmination of its glory in 1630, and did 
not become quite extinct until 1648, when the troubles of the 
Fronde commencing, its habitues were dispersed or absorbed 
by political interests. The presiding genius of this salon, the 
Marquise de Rambouillet, was the very model of the woman 
who can act as anamalgam to the most incongruous elements ; 
beautiful, but not preoccupied by coquetry or passion ; an 
enthusiastic admirer of talent, but with no pretensions to talent 
on her own part ; exquisitely refined in language and mannara, 



WOMAN IN FRANCE ! MADAME DE SABLE. 37 

but warm and generous withal ; not given to entertain her 
guests with her own compositions, or to paralyze them by her 
universal knowledge. She had once meant to learn Latin, but 
had been prevented by an illness ; perhaps she was all the 
better acquainted with Italian and Spanish productions, which, 
in default of a national literature, were then the intellectual 
pabulum of all cultivated persons in France who are unable to 
read the classics. In her mild, agreeable presence was ac- 
complished that blending of the high-toned chivalry of Spain 
with the caustic wit and refined irony of Italy, which issued 
in the creation of a new standard of taste— the combination 
of the utmost exaltation in sentiment with the utmost sim- 
plicity of language. Women arc peculiarly fitted to fur- 
ther such a combination— first, from their greater tendency 
to mingle affection and imagination with passion, and thus 
subtilize it into sentiment ; and next, from that dread of what 
overtaxes their intellectual energies, either by difficulty or 
monotony, which gives them an instinctive fondness for 
lightness of treatment and airiness of expression, thus making 
them cut short all prolixity and reject all heaviness. When 
these womanly characteristics were brought into conversational 
contact with the materials furnished by such minds as those of 
Richelieu, Corneille, the Great Conde, Balzac, and Bossuet, it 
is no wonder that the result was something piquant and charm- 
ing. Those famous habitues of the Hotel de Rambouillet did 
not, apparently, first lay themselves out to entertain the ladies 
with grimacing " small-talk," and then take each other by the 
sword-knot to discuss matters of real interest in a corner ; they 
rather sought to present their best ideas in the guise most 
acceptable to intelligent and accomplished women. And the 
conversation was not of literature only : war, politics, religion, 
the lightest details of daily news— everything was admissible, 
if only it were treated with refinement and intelligence. The 
Hotel de Rambouillet was no mere literary reunion; it 
included homines d'affaires and soldiers as well as authors, and 
in suck a circle wouaea would not become bos bleus or dreamy 



38 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

moralizers, ignorant of the world and of human nature, but 
intelligent observers of character aud events. It is easy to 
understand, however, that with the herd of imitators who, in 
Paris and the provinces, aped the style of this famous salon, 
simplicity degenerated into affectation, and nobility of senti- 
ment was replaced by an inflated effort to outstrip nature, so 
that the genre precietix drew down the satire, which reached its 
climax in the Pre'cieitses Ridicules and Les Femmes Savantes, 
the former of which appeared in I860, and the latter in 1673. 
But Madelon and Caltros are the lineal descendants of Made- 
moiselle Scudery and her satellites, quite as much as of the 
Hotel de Rambouillet. The society which assembled every 
Saturday in her salon was exclusively literary, and although 
occasionally visited by a few persons of high birth, bourgeois 
in its tone, and enamored of madrigals, sonnets, stanzas, and 
bouts rimes. The affectation that decks trivial things in fine 
language belongs essentially to a class which sees another above 
it, and is uneasy in the sense of its inferiority ; and this affec- 
tation is precisely the opposite of the original genre precieux. 
Another centre from which feminine influence radiated into 
the national literature was the Palais du Luxembourg, where 
Mademoiselle d'Orleans, in disgrace at court on account of her 
share in the Fronde, held a little court of her own, and for want 
of anything else to employ her active spirit busied herself with 
literature. One fine morning it occurred to this princess to 
ask all the persons who frequented her court, among whom 
were Madame de Sevigne, Madame de la Fayette, and La 
Rochefoucauld, to write their own portraits, and she at once 
set the example. It was understood that defects and virtues 
were to be spoken of with like candor. The idea was carried 
out ; those who were not clever or bold enough to write for 
themselves employing the pen of a friend. 

11 Such," says M. Cousin, " was the pastime of Mademoiselle and 
her friends during the years 1657 and 1658 : from this pastime pro- 
ceeded a complete literature. In 1659 Segrais revised these por- 
traits, added a oonsideja b le number in prose and even in verse, and 



TYOMAN IN FRANCE I MADAME DE SABLE. 30 

published the whole in a handsome quarto volume, admirably 
printed, and now become very rare, under the title, ' Divers Por- 
traits.' Only thirty copies were printed, not for sale, but to be given 
as presents by Mademoist lie. The work had a prodigious success. 
That which had made thj fortune of Mademoiselle de Scudery's 
romances— the pleasure of seeing one's portrait a little nattered, cu- 
riosity to see that of others, the passion which the middle class 
always have had and will have for knowing what goes on in the aris- 
tocratic world (at that time not very easy of access), the names of 
the illustrious persons who were here for the first time described 
physically and morally with the utmost detail, great ladies trans- 
formed all at once into writers, and unconsciously inventing a new 
manner of writing, of which no book gave the slightest idea, and 
which was the ordinary manner of speaking of the aristocracy ; this 
undeflnable mixture of the natural, the easy, and at the same time of 
the agreeable, and supremely distinguished-all this charmed the 
court and the town, and very early in the year 1659 permission was 
asked of Mademoiselle to give a new edition of the privileged book 
for the use of the public in general." 

The fashion thus set, portraits multiplied throughout France, 
until in 1688 La Bruyere adopted the form in his " Charac- 
ters," and ennobled it by divesting it of personality. We shall 
presently see that a still greater work than La Bruyere's also 
owed its suggestion to a woman, whose salon was hardly a less 
fascinating resoit than the Hotel de Rambouillet itself. 

In proportion as the literature of a country is enriched and 
culture becomes more generally diffused, personal influence is 
less effective in the formation of taste and in the furtherance of 
social advancement. It is no longer the coterie which acts on 
literature, but literature which acts on the coterie ; the circle 
represented by the word public is ever widening, and ambition, 
poising itself in order to hit a more distant mark, neglects the 
successes of the salon. What was once lavished prodigally in 
conversation is reserved for the volume or the " article," and 
the effort is not to betray originality rather than to communi- 
cate it. As the old coach-roads have sunk into disuse through 
the creation of railways, so journalism tends more and more to 
divert information from the channel of conversation into the 



40 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

channel of the Press ; no one is satisfied with a more circum- 
scribed audience than that very indeterminate abstraction " the 
public," and men find a vent for their opinions not in talk, but 
in " copy." We read the A thence' im askance at the tea- 
table, and take notes from the Philosophical Journal at a 
soiree ; we invite our friends that we may thrust a book into 
their hands, and presuppose an exclusive desire in the " ladies" 
to discuss their own matters, " that we may crackie the Times'' 1 
at our ease. In fact, the evident tendency of things to contract 
personal communication within the narrowest limits makes us 
tremble lest some further development of the electric telegraph 
should reduce us to a society of mutes, or to a sort of insects 
communicating by ingenious antenna? of our own invention. 
Things were far from having reached this pass in the last cen- 
tury ; but even then literature and society had outgrown the 
nursing of coteries, and although many salons of that period 
were worthy successors of the Hotel de Rambouillet, they were 
simply a recreation, not an influence. Enviable evenings, no 
doubt, were passed in them ; and if we could be carried back 
to any of them at will, we should hardly know whether to 
choose the Wednesday dinner at Madame Gecffrin's, with 
d'Alembert, Mademoiselle de 1'Espinasse, Grimm, and the rest, 
or the graver society which, thirty years later, gathered round 
Condorcet and his lovely young wife. The salon retained it3 
attractions, but its power was gone : the stream of life had 
become too broad and deep for such small rills to affect it. 

A fair comparison between the French women of the seven- 
teenth century and those of the eighteenth would, perhaps, 
have a balanced result, though it is common to be a partisan 
on this subject. The former have more exaltation, peihaps 
more nobility of sentiment, and less consciousness in their in- 
tellectual activity — less of \hefemme auteur, which was Rous- 
seau's horror in Madame d'Epinay ; but the latter have a licher 
fund of ideas — not more ingenuity, but the materials of an ad- 
ditional century for their ingenuity to work upon. The women 
of the seventeenth century, when love was on the wane, took to 



WOMAN IN FRANCE : MADAME DE SABLE. 41 

devotion, art first mildly and by halves, as English women take 
to caps, and finally without compromise ; with the women of 
the eighteenth century, Bossuet and Massillon had given way 
to Voltaire and Rousseau ; and when youth and beauty failed, 
then they were thrown on their own moral strength. 

M. Cousin is especially enamored of the women of the seven- 
teenth century, and relieves himself from his labors in philoso- 
phy by making researches into the original documents which 
throw light upon their lives. Last year he gave us some 
results of these researches in a volume on the youth of the 
Duchess de Longuevillc ; and he has just followed it up with a 
second volume, in which he further illustrates her career by 
tracing it in connection with that of her friend, Madame dc 
Sable. The materials to which he has had recourse for this 
purpose arc chiefly two celebrated collections of manuscript : 
that of Conrart, the first secretary to the French Academy, one 
of those universally curious people who seem made for the an- 
noyance of contemporaries and the benefit of posterity ; and 
that of Valant, who was at once the physician, the secretary, 
and general steward of Madame de Sable, and who, with or 
without her permission, possessed himself of the letters address- 
ed to her by her numerous correspondents during the latter 
part of her life, and of various papers having some personal or 
literary interest attached to them. From these stores M. 
Cousin has selected many documents previously unedited ; and 
though he often leaves us something to desire in the arrange- 
ment of his materials, this volume of his on Madame de Sable 
is very acceptable to us, for she interests us quite enough to 
carry us through more than three hundred pages of rather scat- 
tered narrative, and through an appendix of CDrrespondence in 
small type. M. Cousin justly appreciates her character as " un 
hcureux melange deraison, d'esprit, d'agrement, et dc bonte ;*' 
and perhaps there are few better specimens of the woman who 
is extreme in nothing but sympathetic in all things ; who 
affects us by no special quality, but by her entire being ; whose 
nature has no tons criards, but is like those textures which, 



42 THE ESSAYS OF " QEOEGE ELIOT. " 

from their harmonious blending of all colors, give repose to tho 
eye, and do not weary us though we see them every day. 
Madame de Sable is also a striking example of the one order of 
influence which woman has exercised over literature in France ; 
and on this ground, as well as intrinsically, she is worth study- 
ing. If the reader agrees with us lie will perhaps be inclined, 
as we are, to dwell a little on the chief points in her life and 
character. 

Madeline de Souvre, daughter of the Marquis of Courten- 
vaux, a nobleman distinguished enough to be chosen as gov- 
ernor of Louis XIII. , was born in 1599, on the threshold of 
that seventeenth century, the brilliant genius of which is mildly 
reflected in her mind and history. Thus, when in 1635 her 
more celebrated friend, Mademoiselle de Bourbon, afterward 
the Duchess de Longueville, made her appearance at the Hotel 
de Rambouillet, Madame de Sable had nearly crossed that table- 
land of maturity which precedes a woman's descent toward old 
age. She had been married in 1614, to Philippe Emanuel de 
Laval-Montmorency, Seigneur de Bois-Dauphin, and Marquis 
de Sable, of whom nothing further is known than that he died 
in 1640, leaving her the richer by four children, but with a 
fortune considerably embarrassed. With beauty and high 
rank added to the mental attractions of which we have abun- 
dant evidence, we may well believe that Madame de Sable's 
youth was brilliant. For her beauty, we have the testimony 
of sober Madame de Motteville, who also speaks of her as 
having " bcaucoup do lumiere et de sincerite ;" and in the 
following passage very graphically indicates one phase of Ma- 
dame de Sable's character : 

" The Marquise de Sable was one of those whose beauty made the 
most noise when the Queen came into France. But if she was ami- 
able, she was still more desirous of appearing so ; this lady's self- 
love rendered her too sensitive to the regard which men exhibited 
toward her. There yet existed in France some remains of the polite- 
ness which Catherine de Medici had introduced from Italy, and the 
new dramas, with all the other works in prose and verse, which 



WOMAN IN FRANCE : MADAME DE SABLE. 43 

came from Madrid, were thought to have such great delicacy, that 
she (Madame de Sable) had conceived a high idea of the gallantry 
which the Spaniards had learned from the Moors. 

" She was persuaded that men can, without crime, have tender 
sentiments for women — that the desire of pleasing them led men to 
the greatest and finest actions— roused their intelligence, and in- 
spired them with liberality, and all sorts of virtues ; but, on the other 
hand, women, who were the ornament of the world, and made to be 
served and adored, ought not to admit anything from them but their 
respectful attentions. As this lady supported her views with much 
talent and great beauty, she had given them authority in her time, 
and the number and consideration of those who continued to associ- 
ate with her have caused to subsist in our day what the Spaniards 
cedl finezas. " 

Here is the grand element of the original femme preciense, and 
it appears further, in a detail also reported by Madame dc Motte- 
ville, that Madame de Sable had a passionate admirer in the ac- 
complished Due de Montmorency, and apparently reciprocat- 
ed his regard ; but discovering (at what period of their attach- 
ment is unknown) that he was raising a lover's eyes toward the 
queen, she broke with him at once. " I have heard her say," 
tells Madame de Motteville, " that her pride was such with re- 
gard to the Due de Montmorency, that at the first demonstra- 
tions which he gave of his change, she refused to see him any 
more, being unable to receive with satisfaction attentions which 
she had to share with the greatest princess in the world." 
There is no evidence except the untrustworthy assertion- of 
Tallement de Reaux, that Madame de Sable had any other 
liaison than this ; and the probability of the negative is in- 
creased by the ardor of her friendships. The strongest of 
these was formed early in life with Mademoiselle Dona 
d' Attichy, afterward Comtesse de Maurc ; it survived the effer- 
vescence of youth, and the closest intimacy of middle age, and 
was only terminated by the death of the latter in 1663. A 
little incident in this friendship is so characteristic in the trans- 
cendentalism* which was then carried into all the affections, that 
it is worth relating at length. Mademoiselle d'Attichy, in 
her grief and indignation at Richelieu's treatment of her rela- 



44 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

live, quitted Paris, and was about to join her friend at Sable, 
•when she suddenly discovered that Madame de Sable, in a letter 
to Madame de Rambouillct, had said that her greatest happi- 
ness would be to pass her life with Julie de Rambouillet, after- 
ward Madame de Montausier. To Anne d'Attichy this appears 
nothing less than the crime of lese-amitie. No explanations 
will appease her : she refuses to accept the assurance that the 
offensive expression was used simply out of unreflecting con- 
formity to the style of the Hotel de Rambouillct — that it wag 
mere *' galimatias." She gives up her journey, and writes a 
letter, which is the only one Madame de Sable chose to pre- 
serve, when, in her period of devotion, she sacrificed the 
records of her youth. Here it is : 

" I have seen this letter in which you tell me there is so much 
galimatias, and I assure you that I have not found any at all. On 
the contrary, I find everything very plainly expressed, and among 
others, one which is too explicit for my satisfaction— namely, what 
you have said to Madame de Rambouillet, that if you tried to imag- 
ine a perfectly happy life for yourself, it would be to pass it all alone 
with Mademoiselle de Rambouillet. You know whether any one can 
be more persuaded than I am of her merit ; but I confess to you 
that that has not prevented me from being surprised that you could 
entertain a thought which did so great an injury to our friendship. 
As to believing that you said this to one, and wrote it to the other, 
simply for the sake of paying them an agreeable compliment, I have 
too high an esteem for your courage to be able to imagine that com- 
plaisance would cause you thus to betray the sentiments of your 
heart, especially on a subject in which, as they were unfavorable to 
me, I think you would have the more reason for concealing them, 
the affection which I have for you being so well known to every one, 
and especially to Mademoiselle de Eambouillet, so that I doubt 
whether she will not have been more sensible of the wrong you have 
done me, than of the advantage you have given her. The circum- 
stance of this letter falling into my hands has forcibly reminded me 
of these lines of Bertaut : 

"' Malheureuse est 1'ignorance 
Et plus malheureux le savoir." 

. " Having through this lost a confidence which alone rendered life 
supportable to me, it is impossible for me to take the journey so 



WOMAN IN FRANCE : MADAME DE SABLE. 45 

much thought of. For would there be any propriety in travelling 
sixty miles in this season, in order to burden you with a person so 
little suited to you, that after years of a passion without parallel, you 
cannot help thinking that the greatest pleasure of your life would be 
to pass it without her? I return, then, into my solitude, to ex- 
amine the defects which cause me so much unhappiness, and unless 
I can correct them, I should have less joy than confusion in seeing 
yon." 

It speaks strongly for the charm of Madame dc Sable's nat- 
ure that she was able to retaiu so susceptible a friend as Made- 
moiselle d'Attichy in spite of numerous other friendships, some 
of which, especially that with Madame do Longueville, wero 
far from lukewarm — in spite too of a tendency in herself to dis- 
trust the affection of others toward her, and to wait for ad- 
vances rather than to make them. We find many traces of 
this tendency in the affectionate remonstrances addressed to 
her by Madame de Longueville, now for shutting herself up 
from her friends, now for doubting that her letters are accept- 
able. Here is a little passage from one of these remonstrances 
which indicates a trait of Madame dc Sable, and is in itself a bit 
of excellent sense, worthy the consideration of lovers and friends 
in general : ct I am very much afraid that if I leave lo you 
the care of letting me know when I can sec you, I shall be a 
long time without having that pleasure, and that nothing will 
incline you to procure it me, for I have always observed a cer- 
tain lukewarmness in your friendship after our explanations, 
from which I have never seen you thoroughly recover ; and that 
is why I dread explanations, for however good they may be in 
themselves, since they serve to reconcile people, it must always 
be admitted, to their shame, that they are at least the effect of 
a bad cause, and that if they remove it for a time they some- 
times leave a certain facility in (jetting angry again, which, 
without diminishing friendship, renders its intercourse less 
agreeable. It seems to me that I find all this in your behavior 
to me ; so I am not wrong in sending to know if you wish to 
have me to-day." It is clear that Madame de Sable was far 



46 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

from Laving what Sainte-Beuve calls the one fault of Madame 
Necker — absolute perfection. A certain exquisiteness in her 
physical and moral nature was, as we shall see, the source of 
more than one weakness, but the perception of these weak- 
nesses, which is indicated in Madame de Longueville's letters, 
heightens our idea of the attractive qualities which notwith- 
standing drew from her, at the sober age of forty, such expres- 
sions as these : " I assure you that you are the person in all 
the world whom it would be most agreeable to me to see, and 
there is no one whose intercourse is a ground of truer satisfac- 
tion to me. It is admirable that at all times, and amidst all 
changes, the taste for your society remains in me ; and, if one 
ought to thank God for the joys which do not tend to salvation, 
I should thank him with all my heart for having preserved that 
to me at a time in which he has taken away from me all 
others." 

Since we have entered on the chapter of Madame de Sable's 
weaknesses, this is the place to mention what was the subject 
of endless raillery from her friends — her elaborate precaution 
about her health, and her dread of infection, even from dis- 
eases the least communicable. Perhaps this anxiety was 
founded as much on aesthetic as on physical grounds, on disgust 
at the details of illness as much as on dread of suffering : 
with a cold in the head or a bilious complaint, the exquisite 
precieuse must have been considerably less conscious of being 
" the ornament of the world," and "made to be adored." 
Even her friendship, strong as it was, was not strong enough to 
overcome her horror of contagion ; for when Mademoiselle de 
Bourbon, recently become Madame de Longueville, was at- 
tacked by small-pox, Madame de Sable for some time had not 
courage to visit her, or even to see Mademoiselle de Rambouil- 
let, who was assiduous in her attendance on the patient. A 
little correspondence a 2 )ro P os of these circumstances so well 
exhibits the graceful badinage in which the great ladies of that 
day were adepts, that we are attempted to quote one short 
letter. 



WOMAN IN FRANCE : MADAME DE SABLE. 47 

" Mile, de Rambouillei to the Marquise de Sable. 

" Mile, de Cbalais (dame de compagnie to the Marquise) will pleas© 
to read this letter to Mme. la Marquise, out of a draught. 

" Madame, I do not think it possible to begin my treaty with you 
too early, for I am convinced that between the first proposition made 
to me that I should see you, and the conclusion, you will have so 
many reflections to make, so many physicians to consult, and so 
many fears to surmount, that I shall have full leisure to air myself. 
The conditions which I offer to fulfil for this purpose are, not to 
visit you until I have been three days absent from the Hotel de 
Conde (where Mme. de Longueville was ill), to choose a frosty day, 
not to approach you within four paces, not to sit down on more than 
one seat. You may also have a great fire in your room, burn juniper 
in the four corners, surround yourself with imperial vinegar, with 
rue and wormwood. If you can feel yourself safe under these con- 
ditions, without my cutting off my hair, I swear to you to execute 
them religiously ; and if you want examples to fortify you, I can tell 
you that the Queen consented to see M. Chaudebonne, when he had 
come directly from Mile, de Bourbon's room, and that Mme. d'Ai- 
guillon, who has good taste in such matters, and is free from reproach 
on these points, has just sent me word that if I did not go to see her 
she would come to me." 

Madame do Sable betrays in her reply that she winces 
under this raillery, and thus provokes a rather severe though 
polite rejoinder, which, added to the fact that Madame de 
Longueville is convalescent, rouses her courage to the pitch of 
paying the formidable visit. Mademoiselle dc Rambouillet, 
made aware through their mutual fiiend Voiture, that her sar- 
casm has cut rather too deep, winds up the matter by writing 
that very difficult production a perfectly conciliatory yet dig- 
nified apology. Peculiarities like this always deepen with ago, 
and accordingly, fifteen years later, we find Madame D'Orleans 
in her " Princesse dc Paphlagonia" — a romance in which sho 
describes her court, with the little quarrels and other affairs 
that agitated it — giving the following amusing picture, or 
rather caricature, of the extent to which Madame de Sable 
carried lier pathological mania, which seems to have been 
shared by her friend the Countess de Maure (Mademoiselle 



48 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT. *' 

d'Attichy). In the romance, these two ladies appear under the 
names of Princessc Parthenie and the Reinc de Mionie. 

" There was not an honr in the day in which they did not confer 
together on the means of avoiding death, and on the art of rendering 
themselves immortal. Their conferences did not take place like 
those of other people ; the fear of breathing an air which was too cold 
or too warm, the dread lest the wind should be too dry or too moist — 
in short, the imagination that the weather might not bo as temperate 
as they thought necessary for the preservation of their health, caused 
them to write letters from one room to the other. It would be ex- 
tremely fortunate if these notes could be found, and formed into a 
collection. I am convinced that they would contain rules for the 
regimen of life, precautions even as to the proper time for applying 
remedies, and also remedies which Hippocrates and Galen, with all 
their science, never heard of. Such a collection would be very use- 
ful to the public, and would be highly profitable to the faculties of 
Paris andMontpellier. If these letters were discovered, great advan- 
tages of all kinds might be derived from them, for they were prin- 
cesses who had nothing mortal about them but the knowledge that 
they were mortal. In their writings might be learned all politeness 
in style, and the most delicate manner of speaking on all subjects. 
There is nothing with which they were not acquainted ; they knew 
the affairs of all the States in the world, through the share they had 
in all the intrigues of its private members, either in matters of gal- 
lantry, as in other things, on which their advice was necessary ; 
either to adjust embroilments and quarrels, or to excite them, for the 
sake of the advantages which their friends could derive from 
them ; — in a word, they were persons through whose hands the 
secrets of the whole world had to pass. The Princess Parthenie 
(Mme. de Sable) had a palate as delicate as her mind ; nothing could 
equal the magnificence of the entertainments she gave ; all the 
dishes were exquisite, and her cleanliness was beyond all that could 
be imagined. It was in their time that writing came into use ; pre- 
viously nothing was written but marriage contracts, and letters were 
never heard of ; thus it is to them that we owe a practice so conven- 
ient in intercourse." 

Still later in 1669. when the most uncompromising of the 
Port Royalists seemed to tax Madame do Sable with lukewarm; 
ness that she did not join them at Port-Roy al-des-Champs, we 
find her writing to the stern M. do Sevigny : " En verite, je 



WOMAN IN FRANCE \ MADAME DE SABLE. . 49 

crois que je ne pourrois mieux faire que de tout quitter et de 
m'en aller Id. Mais que deviendroient ces frayeurs de n'avoir 
pas de medicines a choisir, ni de chirurgien pour me saigner V 9 
Mademoiselle, as we have seen, hints at the love of delicate 
eating, which many of Madame de Sable's friends numbered 
among her foibles, especially after her religious career had com- 
menced. She had a genius in friandise, and knew how to grat- 
ify the palate without offending the highest sense of refinement. 
Her sympathetic nature showed itself in this as in other things ; 
she was always sending bonnes bouches to her friends, and 
trying to communicate to them her science and taste in the 
affairs of the table. Madame de Longueville, who had not the 
luxurious tendencies of her friend, writes : " Je vous demande 
au nom de Dieu, que vous ne me prepariez aucun ragout. 
Surtout ne me donnez point de festin. Au nom de Dieu, qu'il 
n'y ait rien que ce qu'on peut manger, car vous savez que e'est 
inutile pour moi ; de plus j'en ai scrupule." But other 
friends had more appreciation of her niceties. Voiture thanks 
her for her melons, and assures her that they are better than 
those of yesterday ; Madame de Choisy hopes that her ridicule 
of Jansenism will not provoke Madame de Sable to refuse her 
the receipt for salad ; and La Rochefoucauld writes : " You 
cannot do me a greater charity than to permit the bearer of 
this letter to enter into the mysteries of your marmalade and 
your genuine preserves, and I humbly entreat you to do every- 
thing you can in his favor. If I could hope for two dishes of 
those preserves, which I did not deserve to eat before, I should 
be indebted to you all my life." For our own part, being as 
far as possible from fraternizing with those spiritual people 
who convert a deficiency into a principle, and pique themselves 
on an obtuse palate as a point of superiority, we are not 
inclined to number Madame de Sable's friandise among her 
defects. M. Cousin, too, is apologetic on this point. He says : 

" It was only the excess of a delicacy which can be really under- 
stood, aDd a sort of fidelity to the character of precieuse. As the 
precieuse did nothing according to common usage, she could not din« 



50 ♦ THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

like another. We have cited a passage from Mme. de Motteville, 
where Mme. de Sable is represented in her first youth at the Hotel de 
Karnbouillet, maintaining that woman is born to be an ornament to 
the world, and to receive the adoration of men. The woman worthy 
of the name ought always to appear above material wants, and retain, 
even in the most vulgar details of life, something distinguished and 
purified. Eating is a very necessary operation, but one which is not 
agreeable to the eye. Mme. de Sable insisted on its being conducted 
with a peculiar cleanliness. According to her it was not every woman 
who could with impunity be at table in the presence of a lover ■ the 
first distortion of the face, she said, would be enough to spoil all. 
Gross meals made for the body merely ought to be abandoned to 
bourgeoises, and the refined woman should appear to take a little 
nourishment merely to sustain her, and even to divert her, as one 
takes refreshments and ices. "Wealth did not suffice for this : a par- 
ticular talent was required. Mme. de Sable was a mistress in this 
art. She had transported the aristocratic spirit, and the genre 
precieux, good breeding and good taste, even into cookery. Her din- 
ners, without any opulence, were celebrated and sought after." 

It is quite in accordance with all this that Madame de Sable 
should delight in fine scents, and we find that she did ; for 
being threatened, in her Port Royal days, when she was at an 
advanced age, with the loss of smell, and writing for sympathy 
and information to Mere Agnes, who had lost that sense early 
in life, she receives this admonition from the stern saint : 
V You would gain by this loss, my very dear, sister, if you 
made use of it as a satisfaction to God, for having had too 
much pleasure in delicious scents." Scarron describes her as 

"La non pareille Bois-Dauphine, 

Entre dames perle ires fine, ' ' 

and the superlative delicacy implied by this epithet seems to 
have belonged equally to her personal habits, her. affections, 

and her intellect. •'.-•■ . • 

Madame de Sable's life, for anything we know, flowed on 
evenly enough until 1640, when the death of her husband 
threw upon her the care of an embarrassed fortune. She 
found a friend in Rene de Longueil, Seigneur de Maisons, of 
whom we aro content to know no more than that ho helped 



WOMAN IN FRANCE : MADAME DE SABLE. 51 

Madame de Sable to arrange her affairs, though only by means 
of alienating from her family the estate of Sable, that his house 
was her refuge during the blockade of Paris in 1649, and that 
she was not unmindful of her obligations to him, when, sub- 
sequently, her credit could be serviceable to him at court. In 
the midst of these pecuniary troubles came a more terrible trial 
— the loss of her favorite son, the brave and handsome Guy de 
Laval, who, after a brilliant career in the campaigns of Conde, 
was killed at the siege of Dunkirk, in 1646, when scarcely 
four-and-twenty. The fine qualities of this young man had 
endeared him to the whole army, and especially to Conde, had 
won him the hand of the Chancellor Seguire's daughter, and 
had thus opened to him the prospect of the highest honors. 
His loss seems to have been the most real sorrow of Madame 
de Sable's life. Soon after followed the commotions of the 
Fronde, which put a stop to social intercourse, and threw the 
closest friends into opposite ranks. According to Lenct, who 
relies on the authority of Gourville, Madame de Sable was 
under strong obligations to the court, being in the receipt of a 
pension of 2000 crowns ; at all events, she adhered through- 
out to the Queen and Mazarin, but being as far as possible 
from a fierce partisan, and given both by disposition and judg- 
ment to hear both sides of the question, she acted as a con- 
ciliator, and retained her friends of both parties. The 
Countess de Maure, whose husband was the most obstinate of 
frondeurs, remained throughout her most cherished friend, 
and she kept up a constant correspondence with the lovely and 
intrepid heroine of the Fronde, Madame de Longueville. Her 
activity was directed to the extinction of animosities, by 
bringing about marriages between the Montagues and Capu- 
lets of the Fronde—between the Prince de Conde, or his 
brother, and the niece of Mazarin, or between the three 
nieces of Mazarin and the sons of three noblemen who were 
distinguished leaders of the Fronde. Though her projects 
were not realized, her conciliatory position enabled her to 
preserve all her friendships intact, and when the political 



5£ ' THE ESSAYS OF -" &EORGE ELiOT." 

tempest was over, she could assemble around her in her 
residence, in the Place Royal, the same society as before. 
Madame de Sable was now approaching her twelfth lustrum, 
and though the charms of her mind and character made her 
more sought after than most younger women, it is not sur- 
prising that, sharing as she did in the religious ideas of her 
time, the concerns of M salvation" seemed to become pressing. 
A religious retirement, which did not exclude the reception of 
literary friends or the care for personal comforts, made the 
most becoming frame for age and diminished fortune. Jan- 
senism was then to ordinary Catholicism what Puseyism is to 
ordinary Church of Englandism in these days — it was a 
recherche form of piety unshared by the vulgar ; and one sees 
at once that it must have special attractions for the pre~cieuse. 
Madame de Sable, then, probably about 1655 or '56, de- 
termined to retire to Port Royal, not because she was already 
devout, but because she hoped to become so ; as, however, she 
wished to retain the pleasure of intercourse with friends who 
were still worldly, she built for herself a set of apartments at 
once distinct from the monastery and attached to it. Here, 
with a comfortable establishment, consisting of her secretary, 
Dr. Valant, Mademoiselle de Chalais, formerly her dame de 
compar/nie, and now become her friend ; an excellent cook ; a 
few other servants, and for a considerable time a carriage and 
coachman ; with her best friends within a moderate distance, 
she could, as M. Cousin says, be out of the noise of the world 
without altogether forsaking it, preserve her dearest friend- 
ships, and have before her eyes edifying examples — " vaquer 
enfin a son aise aux soins de son salut et a ceux de sa sante." 
We have hitherto looked only at one phase of Madame de 
Sable's character and influence — that of the precieuse. But she 
was much more than this : she was the valuable, trusted friend 
of noble women and distinguished men ; she was the animating 
spirit of a society, whence issued a new form of French 
literature ; she was the woman of large capacity and large 
heart, whom Pascal sought to please, to whom Arnauld sub- 



WOMAN IN FRANCE : MADAME DE SABLE. 53 

mitted the Discourse prefixed to his " Logic," and to whom 
La Rochefoucauld writes : " Vous savez que je ne crois que 
vous etes sur de certains chapitres, et surtout sur les replis 
du cceur. " The papers preserved by her secretary, Valant, 
show that she maintained an extensive correspondence with 
persons of various rank and character ; that her pen was un- 
tiring in the interest of others ; that men made her the 
depositary of their thoughts, women of their sorrows ; that 
her friends were as impatient, when she secluded herself, as if 
they had been rival lovers and she a youthful beauty. It is 
into her ear that Madame de Longueville pours her troubles 
and difficulties, and that Madame de la Fayette communicates 
her little alarms, lest young Count de St. Paul should have 
detected her intimacy with La Rochefoucauld.* The few of 
Madame de Sable's letters which survive show that she ex- 
celled in that epistolary style which was the specialty of the 
Hotel de Rambouillet : one to Madame de Montausier, in 
favor of M. Perier, the brother-in-law of Pascal, is a happy 
mixture of good taste and good sense ; but among them all 
we prefer quoting one to the Duchess de la Tremouille. It is 
light and pretty, and made out of almost nothing, like soap- 
bubbles. 

" Je croix qu'il n'y a que nioi qui face si bien tout le contraire de 
ce que je veux faire, car il est vrai qu'il n'y a personne que j'honore 
plus que vous, et j'ai si bien fait qu'il est quasi impossible que vous 
le puissiez croire. Ce n' estoit pas assez pour vous persuader que je 
suis indigne de vos bonnes graces et de votre souvenir que d' avoir 
manque fort longtemps a, vous ecrire ; il falloit encore retarder quinze 
jours a me donner l'honneur de repondre a votre lettre. En verite, 
Madame, cela me fait paroitre si coupable, que vers tout autre que 
vous j'aimeroix mieux l'etre en effet que d' entreprendre une chose si 
difficile qu' est celle de me justifier. Mais je me sens si innocente 

* The letter to which we allude has this charming little touch : 
" Je hais comme la tnort que les gens de son age puissent croire que 
j'ai des galanteries. II semble qu'on leur parait cent ans des qu'on 
est plus vieille qu'eux, et ils sont tout propre a" s' etonner qu'il y ait 
encore question des gens." 



54 THE ESSAYS OF 

dans mon ame, et j'ai tant d'estime, de respect et d'affection pour 
vous, qu'il me senible que vous devez le connoitre a cent lieues de 
distance d'ici, encore que je ne vous dise pas un mot. C'est ce que 
me donne le courage de vous ecrire a cette heure, mais non pas ce qui 
m'ena empeche si longtemps. J'ai commence a faillir par force, 
ayant eu beaucoup de inaux, et depuis je l'ai faite par honte, et je 
vous avoue que si je n'avois a cette heure la confiance que vous 
m'avez donnee en me rassurant, et celle que je tire de mes propres 
sentimens pour vous, je n'oserois jamais entreprendre de vous faire 
souvenir de moi ; mais je m 'assure que vous oublierez tout, sur la 
protestation que je vous fais de ne me laisser plus endurcir en mes 
fautes et de demeurer inviolablement, Madame, votre, etc." 

Was not the woman, who could unite the ease and grace 
indicated by this letter, with an intellect that men thought 
worth consulting on matters of reasoning and philosophy, with 
warm affections, untiring activity for others, no ambition a9 an 
authoress, and an insight into confitures and ragouts, a rare 
combination ? No wonder that her salon at Port Royal was 
the favorite resort of such women as Madame de la Fayette, 
Madame de Montausier, Madame de Longueville, and Madame 
de Hautefort ; and of such men as Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, 
Nicole, and Domat. The collections of Yalant contain papers 
which show what were the habitual subjects of conversation in 
this salon. Theology, of course, was a chief topic ; but 
physics and metaphysics had their turn, and still more fre- 
quently morals, taken in their widest sense. There were 
11 Conferences on Calvinism," of which an abstract is pre- 
served. When Rohault invented his glass tubes to serve for 
the barometrical experiments in which Pascal had roused a 
strong interest, the Marquis de Sourdis entertained the society 
with a paper entitled " Why W r ater Mounts in a Glass Tube." 
Cartesianism was an exciting topic here, as well as everywhere 
else in France ; it had its partisans and opponents, and papers 
were read containing " Thoughts on the Opinions of M. 
Descartes." These lofty matters were varied by discussions 
on love and friendship, on the drama, and on most of the 
things in heaven and earth which the philosophy of that day 



WOMAN IN FRANCE I MADAME DE SABLE. 55 

dreamt of. Morals — generalizations on human affections, 
sentiments, and conduct — seem to have been the favorite 
theme ; and the aim was to reduce these generalizations to their 
briefest form of expression, to give them the epigrammatic 
turn which made them portable in the memory. This was the 
specialty of Madame de Sable's circle, and was, probably, due 
to her own tendency. As the Hotel de Rambouillet was the 
nursery of graceful letter- writing, and the Luxembourg of 
" portraits" and " characters," so Madame de Sable's salon 
fostered that taste for the sententious style, to which we owe, 
probably, some of the best Pensees of Pascal, and certainly, 
the " Maxims" of La Rochefoucauld. Madame de Sable herself 
wrote maxims, which were circulated among her friends ; and, 
after her death, were published by the Abbe d'Ailly. They 
have the excellent sense and nobility of feeling which we 
should expect in everything of hers ; but they have no stamp 
of genius or individual character : they are, to the " Maxims" 
of La Rochefoucauld, what the vase moulded in dull, heavy 
clay is to the vase which the action of fire has made light, 
brittle, and transparent. She also wrote a treatise on Educa- 
tion, which is much praised by La Rochefoucauld and M. 
d'Andilly ; but which seems no longer to be found : probably 
it was not much more elaborate than her so-called " Treatise 
on Friendship," which is but a short string of maxims. 
Madame de Sable's forte was evidently not to write herself, but 
to stimulate others to write ; to show that sympathy and 
appreciation which are as genial and encouraging as the morn- 
ings sunbeams. She seconded a man's wit with understanding: 
— one of the best offices which womanly intellect has rendered 
to the advancement of culture ; and the absence of originality 
made her all the more receptive toward the originality of 
others. 

The manuscripts of Pascal show that many of the Pensees, 
which are commonly supposed to be raw materials for a great 
work on religion, were remodelled again and again, in order to 
bring them to the highest degree of terseness and finish, which 



56 THE ESSAYS OF ( f GEORGE ELIOT." 

would hardly have been the case if they had only been part of 
a quarry for a greater production. Thoughts, which are 
merely collected as materials, as stones out of which a building 
is to be erected, are not cut into facets, and polished like 
amethysts or emeralds. Since Pascal was from the first in the 
habit of visiting Madame de Sable, at Port Royal, with his 
sister, Madame Perier (who was one of Madame de Sable's 
dearest friends), we may well suppose that he would throw 
some of his jewels among the large and small coin of maxims, 
which were a sort of subscription money there. Many of 
them have an epigrammatical piquancy, which was just the 
thing to charm a circle of vivacious and intelligent women : 
they seem to come from a La Rochefoucauld who has been 
dipped over again in philosophy and wit, and received a new 
layer. But whether or not Madame de Sable's influence served 
to enrich the Pensees of Pascal, it is clear that but for her 
influence the " Maxims" of La Rochefoucauld would never 
have existed. Just as in some circles the effort is, who shall 
make the best puns (horibile dicta /), or the best charades, in 
the salon of Port Royal the amusement was to fabricate 
maxims. La Rochefoucauld said, " L'envie de faire des 
maximes se gagne comme le rhume. " So far from claiming 
for himself the initiation of this form of writing, he accuses 
Jacques Esprit, another habitue of Madame de Sable's salon, of 
having excited in him the taste for maxims, in order to trouble 
his repose. The said Esprit was an academician, and had been 
a frequenter of the Hotel de Rambouillet. He had already 
published " Maxims in Verse," and he subsequently produced 
a book called " La Faussete des Vertus Humaines," which 
seems to consist of Rochefoucauldism become flat with an 
infusion of sour Calvinism. Nevertheless, La Rochefoucauld 
seems to have prized him, to have appealed to his judgment, 
and to have concocted maxims with him, which he afterward 
begs him to submit to Madame Sable. He sends a little batch of 
maxims to her himself, and asks for an equivalent in the shape 
of good eatables : * • Voila tout ce que j'ai de maximes ; mais 



WOMAN IN FRANCE: M'ADAME-ttS SABLE. 57 

cotnme je ne donne rieti pour rien, je vous demande un potage 
aux carottes, un ragout de mouton," etc. The taste and the 
talent enhanced each other ; until, at last, La Rochefoucauld 
began to be conscious of his pre-eminence in the circle of 
maxim-mongers, and thought of a wider audience. Thus grew 
up the famous " Maxims," about which little need be said. 
Every at once is now convinced, or professes to be convinced, 
that, as to form, they are perfect, and that as to matter, they 
are at once undeniably true and miserably false ; true as applied 
to that condition of human nature in which the selfish instincts 
are still dominant, false if taken as a representation of all the 
elements and possibilities of human nature. We think La 
Rochefoucauld himself wavered as to their universality, and 
that this wavering is indicated in the qualified form of some of 
the maxims ; it occasionally struck him that the shadow of 
virtue must have a substance, but he had never grasped that 
substance — it had never been present to his consciousness. 

It is curious to see La Rochefoucauld's nervous anxiety 
about presenting himself before the public as an author ; far 
from rushing into print, he stole into it, and felt his way by 
asking private opinions. Through Madame de Sable he sent 
manuscript copies to various persons of taste and talent, both 
men and women, and many of the written opinions which he 
received in reply are still in existence. The women generally 
find the maxims distasteful, but the men write approvingly. 
These men, however, are for the most part ecclesiastics, who 
decry human nature that they may exalt divine grace. The 
coincidence between Augustinianism or Calvinism, with its 
doctrine of human corruption, and the hard cynicism of the 
maxims, presents itself in quite a piquant form in some of the 
laudatory opinions on La Rochefoucauld. One writer says : 
" On ne pourroit faire une instruction plus propre a un 
catechumene pour convertir a Dieu son esprit et sa volonte 
. . . Quand il n'y auroit que cet escrit au monde et l'Evangile 
je voudrois etre chretien. L'un m'apprendroit a. connoistre 
mes miseres, et l'autre a implorer mon liberateur." Madame 



58 THE ESSAYS OF 

do Maintenon sends word to La Rochefoucauld, after the 
publication of his work, that the ii Book of Job'* and the 
M Maxims" are her only reading. 

That Madame de Sable herself had a tolerably just idea of 
La Rochefoucauld's character, as well as of his maxims, may 
be gathered not only from the fact that her own maxims are as 
full of the confidence in human goodness which La Roche- 
foucauld wants, as they are empty of the style which he 
possesses, but also from a letter in which she replies to the 
criticisms of Madame de Schomberg. u The author," she 
says, ''derived the maxim on indolence from his own dis- 
position, for never was there so great an indolence as his, and 
I think that his heart, inert as it is, owes this defect as much to 
his idleness as his will. It has never permitted him to do the 
least action for others ; and I think that, amid all his great 
desires and great hopes, he is sometimes indolent even on his 
own behalf." Still she must have felt a hearty interest in the 
M Maxims," as in some degree her foster-child, and she must 
also have had considerable affection for the author, who was 
lovable enough to those who observed the rule of Helvetius, 
and expected nothing from him. She not only assisted him, 
as we have seen, in getting criticisms, and carrying out the 
improvements suggested by them, but when the book was 
actually published she prepared a notice of it for the only 
journal then existing — the Journal des Savants. This notice 
was originally a brief statement of the nature of the work, and 
the opinions which had been formed for and against it, with a 
moderate eulogy, in conclusion, on its good sense, wit, and 
insight into human nature. But when she submitted it to La 
Rochefoucauld he objected to the paragraph which stated the 
adverse opinion, and requested her to alter it. She, however, 
was either unable or unwilling to modify her notice, and 
returned it with the following note : 

" Je vous envoie ce que j'ai pu tirer de ma teste pour mettre dans le 
Journal des Savants. J'y ai mis cet endroit qui vous est le plus 
sensible, afin que cela vous fasse surmonter la mauvaise honte qui 



WOMAN" IN FRANCE : MADAME DE SABLE. 59 

vous fit mettre la preface sans y rien retrancher, et je n'ai pas craint 
dele mettre, parce que je suis assuree que vous ne le ferez pas im- 
primer, quand meme le reste vous plairoit. Je vous assure aussi que 
je vous serai plus obligee, si vous en usez comme d'une chose qui ser- 
vit a vous pour le corriger ou pour le jeter au feu. Nous autres 
grands auteurs, nous sommes trop riches pour craindre de rien perdre 
de nos productions; Mandez-moi ce qu'il vous semble de ce dictum." 

La Rochefoucauld availed himself of this permission, and 
" edited" the notice, touching up the style, and leaving out 
the blame. In this revised form it appeared in the Journal des 
Savants. In some points, we see, the youth of journalism was 
not without promise of its future. 

While Madame de Sable was thus playing the literary con- 
fidante to La Rochefoucauld, and was the soul of a society 
whose chief interest was the belles-lettres, she was equally active 
in graver matters. She was in constant intercourse or cor- 
respondence with the devout women of Port Royal, and of the 
neighboring convent of the Carmelites, many of whom had once 
been the ornaments of the court ; and there is a proof that she 
was conscious of being highly valued by them in the fact that 
when the Princess Marie-Madeline, of the Carmelites, was 
dangerously ill, not being able or not daring to visit her, she 
sent her youthful portrait to be hung up in the sick-room, and 
received from the same Mere : Agnes, whose grave admonition 
we have quoted above, a charming note, describing the pleasure 
which the picture had given in the infirmary- of M Notre bonne 
Mere. She was interesting herself deeply in the translation 
of the New Testament, which was the work of Sacy, Arnauld, 
Nicole, Le Maitre, and the Due de Luynes conjointly, Sacy 
having. the principal share. -We have mentioned that Arnauld 
asked her opinion on -the M Discourse" prefixed to his 
" Logic," and we may conclude from this that he had found 
her judgment valuable in many other cases. Moreover, the 
persecution of the Port Royalists had commenced, and she was 
uniting with Madame de Longueville in aiding and protecting 
her pious friends. Moderate in her Jansenism, as in every- 



60 THE ESSAYS OF 

thing else, she held that the famous formulary denouncing the 
Augustinian doctrine, and declaring it to have been originated 
by Jansenius, should be signed without reserve, and, as usual, 
she had faith in conciliatory measures ; but her moderation was 
no excuse for inaction. She was at one time herself threatened 
with the necessity of abandoning her residence at Port Royal, 
and had thought of retiring to a religious house at Auteuil, a 
village near Paris. She did, in fact, pass some summers there, 
and she sometimes took refuge with her brother, the Comman- 
deur de Souvre, with Madame de Montausier, or Madame de 
Longueville. The last was much bolder in her partisanship 
than her friend, and her superior wealth and position enabled 
her to give the Port Royalists more efficient aid. Arnauld and 
Nicole resided five years in her house ; it was under her 
protection that the translation of the New Testament was 
carried on and completed, and it was chiefly through her 
efforts that, in 1669, the persecution was brought to an end. 
Madame de Sable co-operated with all her talent and interest 
in the same direction ; but here, as elsewhere, her influence 
was chiefly valuable in what she stimulated others to do, rather 
than in what she did herself. It was by her that Madame de 
Longueville was first won to the cause of Port Royal ; and we 
find this ardent brave woman constantly seeking the advice and 
sympathy of her more timid and self-indulgent, but sincere and 
judicious friend. 

In 1669, when Madame de Sable had at length rest from 
these anxieties, she was at the good old age of seventy, but she 
lived nine years longer — years, we may suppose, chiefly 
dedicated to her spiritual concerns. This gradual, calm decay 
allayed the fear of death, which had tormented her more 
vigorous days ; and she died with tranquillity and trust. It is 
a beautiful trait of these last moments that she desired not to 
be buried with her family, or even at Port Royal, among her 
saintly and noble companions — but in the cemetery of her 
parish, like one of the people, without pomp or ceremony. 

It is worth while to notice, that with Madame de Sable, as 



WOMAN IN FRANCE I MADAME DE SABLE. 61 

with some other remarkable French women, the part of her life 
which is richest in interest and results is that which is looked 
forward to by most of her sex with melancholy as the period of 
decline. When between fifty and sixty, she had philosophers, 
wits, beauties, and saints clustering around her ; and one 
naturally cares to know what was the elixir which gave her this 
enduring and general attraction. Wo think it was, in a great 
degree, that well-balanced development of mental powers which 
gave her a comprehension of varied intellectual processes, and 
a tolerance for varied forms of character, which is still rarer in 
women than in men. Here was one point of distinction 
between her and Madame de Longueville ; and an amusing 
passage, which Sainte-Beuve has disinterred from the writings 
of the Abbe St. Pierre, so well serves to indicate, by contrast, 
what we regard as the great charm of Madame de Sable's mind, 
that we shall not be wandering from our subject in quoting it. 

1 • I one day asked 11 Nicole what was the character of Mme. de 
Longueville's intellect ; he told me it was very subtle and delicate in 
the penetration of character ; but very small, very feeble, and that 
her comprehension was extremely narrow in matters of science and 
reasoning, and on all speculations that did not concern matters of 
sentiment. For example, he added, I one day said to her that I could 
wager and demonstrate that there .were in Paris at least two inhabi- 
tants who had the same number of hairs, although I could not point 
out who these two men were. She told me I could never be sure of 
it until I had counted the hairs of these two men. Here is my 
demonstration, I said : I take it for granted that the head which is 
most amply supplied with hairs has not more than 200,000, and the 
head which is least so has but one hair. Now, if you suppose that 
200,000 heads have each a different number of hairs, it necessarily 
follows that they have each one of the numbers of hairs which form 
the series from one to 200,000 ; for if it were supposed that there 
were two among these 200,000 who had the same number of hairs, I 
should have gained my wager. Supposing, then, that these 200,000 
inhabitants have all a different number of hairs, if I add a single 
inhabitant who has hairs, and who has not more than 200,000, it 
necessarily follows that this number of hairs, whatever it may be, 
will be contained in the series from one to 200,000, and consequent- 
ly will be equal to the number of hairs on one of the previous 200,000 



62 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

inhabitants. Now as, instead of one inhabitant more than 200,000, 
there are nearly 800,000 inhabitants in Paris, you see clearly that 
there must be many heads which have an equal number of hairs, 
though I have not counted them. Still Mme. de Longueville could 
never comprehend that this equality of hairs could be demonstrated, 
and always maintained that the only way of proving it was to count 
them." 

Surely, the most ardent admirer of feminine shallowness 
must have felt some irritation when he found himself arrested 
by this dead wall of stupidity, and have turned with relief to 
the larger intelligence of Madame de Sable, who was not the less 
graceful, delicate, and feminine because she could follow a 
train of reasoning, or interest herself in a question of science. 
In this combination consisted her pre-eminent charm : she was 
not a genius, not a heroine, but a woman whom men could 
more than love — whom they could make their friend, con- 
fidante, and counsellor ; the sharer, not of their joys and 
sorrows only, but of their ideas and aims. 

Such was Madame de Sable, whose name is, perhaps, new to 
some of our readers, so far does it lie from the surface of 
literature and history. We have seen, too, that she was only 
one among a crowd — one in a firmament of feminine stars 
which, when once the biographical telescope is turned upon 
them, appear scarcely less remarkable and interesting. Now, 
if the reader . recollects what was the position and average 
intellectual character of women in the high society of -England 
during the reigns of James the First and the two Charleses — the 
period through which Madame de Sable's career extends — we 
think he will admit our position as to the early superiority of 
womanly development in France, and this fact, with its causes, 
has not merely an ..historical, interest : it has an important 
bearing on the culture of women in the present day. .Women 
become superior in France by being admitted to a common 
fund of ideas, to common objects of interest with men ; and this 
must ever be the essential condition at once of true womanly 
culture and of true social well-being. We have no faith in 
feminine conversazioni, wiiere ladies, .are- eloquent .on Apollo. 



WOMAN IN FRANCE : MADAME DE SABLE. 63 

and Mars ; though we sympathize with the yearning activity of 
faculties which, deprived of their proper material, waste them- 
selves in weaving fabrics out of cobwebs. Let the whole field 
of reality be laid open to woman as well as to man, and then 
that which is peculiar in her mental modification, instead of 
being, as it is now, a source of discord and repulsion between 
the sexes, will be found to be a necessary complement to the 
truth and beauty of life. Then we shall have that marriage of 
minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and 
feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of 
human happiness. 



III. 

EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING.* 

Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not 
higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great 
glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid 
of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputa- 
tion in English society ? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity 
in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for pro- 
found instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, 
bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given 
piety ? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher ; he 
will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great 
ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, 
a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity. Let 
him shun practical extremes and be ultra only in what is purely 
theoretic ; let him be stringent on predestination, but latitudi- 
narian on fasting ; unflinching in insisting on the Eternity of 
punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts 

* 1. " The Church before the Flood." By the Rev. John Cum- 
ming, D.D. 2. " Occasional Discourses." By the Rev. John dim- 
ming, D.D. In two vols. 3. " Signs of the Times ; or, Present, 
Past, and Future." By the Rev. John Cumming, D.D. 4. " The 
Finger of God." By the Rev. John Cumming, D.D. 5. " Is Chris- 
tianity from God ? or, a Manual of Christian Evidence, for Scripture- 
Readers, City Missionaries, Sunday-School Teachers, etc." By the 
Rev. John Cumming, D.D. G. Apocalyptic Sketches ; or, Lectures 
on the Book of Revelation." First Series. By the Rev. John Cum- 
ming, D.D. 7. "Apocalyptic Sketches." Second Series. By the 
Rev. John Cumming, D.D. 8 " Prophetic Studies ; or, Lectures on 
the Book of Daniel." By the Rev. John Cumming, D.D. 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING I DR. CUMitlNQ. 65 

of Time ; ardent and imaginative on the pre-millennial advent 
of Christ, but cold and cautious toward every other infringe- 
ment of the status quo. Let him fish for souls not with the 
bait of inconvenient singularity, but with the drag-net of com- 
fortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal in his inter- 
pretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of un- 
believers and adversaries, but w r hen the letter of the Scriptures 
presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth 
century, let him use his spiritualizing alembic and disperse it 
into impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of 
Antichrist ; let him be less definite in showing what sin is than 
in showing who is the Man of Sin, less expansive on the blessed- 
ness of faith than on the accursedness of infidelity. Above 
all, let him set up as an interpreter of prophecy, and rival 
Moore's Almanack in the prediction of political events, tickling 
the interest of hearers who are but moderately spiritual by 
showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems and cha- 
rades for their benefit, and how, if they are ingenious enough 
to solve these, they may have their Christian graces nourished 
by learning precisely to whom they may point as the " horn 
that had eyes," " the lying prophet," and the " unclean 
spirits." In this way he will draw men to him by the strong 
cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized 
with the name of piety. In this way he may gain a metropoli- 
tan pulpit ; the avenues to his church will be as crowded as the 
passages to the opera ; he has but to print his prophetic ser- 
mons and bind them in lilac and gold, and they will adorn the 
drawing-room table of all evangelical ladies, who will regard 
as a sort of pious ' ' light reading' ' the demonstration that the 
prophecy of the locusts whose sting is in their tail, is fulfilled 
in the fact of the Turkish commander's having taken a horse's 
tail for his standard, and that the French are the very frogs 
predicted in the Revelations. 

Pleasant to the clerical flesh under such circumstances is the 
arrival of Sunday ! Somewhat at a disadvantage during the 
week, in the presence of working-day interests and lay splen- 



66 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

dors, on Sunday the preacher becomes the cynosure of a thou- 
sand eyes, and predominates at once over the Amphitryon with 
whom he dines, and the most captious member of his church or 
vestry. He has an immense advantage over all other public 
speakers. The platform orator is subject to the criticism of 
hisses and groans. Counsel for the plaintiff expects the retort 
of counsel for the defendant. The honorable gentleman on one 
side of the House is liable to have his facts and figures shown 
up by his honorable friend on the opposite side. Even the 
scientific or literary lecturer, if he is dull or incompetent, may 
see the best part of his audience quietly slip out one by one. 
But the preacher is completely master of the situation : no one 
may hiss, no one may depart. Like the writer of imaginary 
conversations, he may put what imbecilities he pleases into 
the mouths of his antagonists, and swell with triumph when 
he has refuted them. He may riot in gratuitous assertions, 
confident that no man will contradict him ; he may exercise 
perfect free-will in logic, and invent illustrative experience ; 
he may give an evangelical edition of history with the in- 
convenient facts omitted : — all this he may do with impuni- 
ty, certain that those of his hearers who are not sympathizing 
are not listening. For the Press has no band of critics who go 
the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch 
for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a " feature" in 
their article : the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible 
of all talkers. For this reason, at least, it is well that they do 
not always allow their discourses to be merely fugitive, but are 
often induced to fix them in that black and white in which 
they are open to the criticism of any man who has the courage 
and patience to treat them with thorough freedom of speech 
and pen. 

It is because we think this criticism of clerical teaching de- 
sirable for the public good that we devote some pages to Dr. 
dimming. He is, as every one knows, a preacher of immense 
popularity, and of the numerous publications in which he per- 
petuates his pulpit labors, all circulate widely, and some, ac- 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING : DR. CUMMING. 6? 

cording to their title-page, have reached the sixteenth thousand. 
Now our opinion of these publications is the very opposite of 
that given by a newspaper eulogist : we do not " believe that 
the repeated issues of Dr. Cumming's thoughts are having a 
beneficial effect on society," but the reverse ; and hence, little 
inclined as we are to dwell on his pages, we think it worth 
while to do so, for the sake of pointing out in them what we 
believe to be profoundly mistaken and pernicious. Of Dr. 
dimming personally we know absolutely nothing : our ac- 
quaintance with him is confined to a perusal of his works, our 
judgment of him is founded solely on the manner in which he 
has written himself down on his pages. We know neither 
how he looks nor how he lives. We are ignorant whether, 
like St. Paul, he has a bodily presence that is weak and con- 
temptible, or whether his person is as florid and as prone to 
amplification as his style. For aught we know, he may not 
only have the gift of prophecy, but may bestow the profits of 
all his works to feed the poor, and be ready to give his own 
body to be burned with as much alacrity as he infers the ever- 
lasting burning of Roman Catholics and Puseyites. Out of the 
pulpit he may be a model of justice, truthfulness, and the love 
that thinketh no evil ; but we are obliged to judge of his char- 
ity by the spirit we find in his sermons, and shall only be glad 
to learn that his practice is, in many respects, an amiable non 
sequitur from his teaching. 

Dr. Cumming's mind is evidently not of the pietistic order. 
There is not the slightest leaning toward mysticism in his Chris- 
tianity — no indication of religious raptures, of delight in God, 
of spiritual communion with the Father. He is most at home 
in the forensic view of Justification, and dwells on salvation as 
a scheme rather than as an experience. He insists on good 
works as the sign of justifying faith, as labors to be achieved 
to the glory of God, but he rarely represents them as the 
spontaneous, necessary outflow of a soul filled with Divine 
love. He is at home in the external, the polemical, the histor- 
ical, the circumstantial, and is only episodically devout and 



68 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

practical. The great majority of his published sermons 
are occupied with argument or philippic against Roman- 
ists and unbelievers, with " vindications" of the Bible, with 
the political interpretation of prophecy, or the criticism of 
public events ; and the devout aspiration, or the spiritual 
and practical exhortation, is tacked to them as a sort of 
fringe in a hurried sentence or two at the end. He revels in 
the demonstration that the Pope is the Man of Sin ; he is copi- 
ous on the downfall of the Ottoman empire ; he appears to 
glow with satisfaction in turning a story which tends to show 
how he abashed an " infidel ;" it is a favorite exercise with 
him to form conjectures of the process by which the earth is 
to be burned up, and to picture Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Wilber- 
force being caught up to meet Christ in the air, while Roman- 
ists, Puseyites, and infidels are given over to gnashing of teeth. 
But of really spiritual joys and sorrows, of the life and death of 
Christ as a manifestation of love that constrains the soul, of 
sympathy with that yearning over the lost and erring which 
made Jesus weep over Jerusalem, and prompted the sublime 
prayer, " Father, forgive them," of the gentler fruits of the 
Spirit, and the peace of God which passeth understanding 
— of all this, we find little trace in Dr. Cumming's dis- 
courses. 

His style is in perfect correspondence with this habit of 
mind. Though diffuse, as that of all preachers must be, it has 
rapidity of movement, perfect clearness, and some aptness of 
illustration. He has much of that literary talent which makes 
a good journalist- -the power of beating out an idea over a 
large space, and of introducing far-fetched d propos. His 
writings have, indeed, no high merit : they have no originality 
or force of thought, no striking felicity of presentation, no 
depth of emotion. Throughout nine volumes we have alighted 
on no passage which impressed us as worth extracting, and 
placing among the " beauties" of evangelical writers, such as 
Robert Hall, Foster the Essayist, or Isaac Taylor. Everywhere 
there is commonplace cleverness, nowhere a spark of rare 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING : DR'. CUMMING. '6$ 

thought, of lofty sentiment, or pathetic tenderness. We feel 
ourselves in company with a voluble retail talker, whose lan- 
guage is exuberant but not exact, and to whom we should never 
think of referring for precise information or for well-digested 
thought and experience. His argument continually slides into 
wholesale assertion and vague declamation, and in his love of 
ornament he frequently becomes tawdry. For example, he tells 
us (" Apoc. Sketches," p. 265) that " Botany weaves around 
the cross her amaranthine garlands ; and Newton comes from 
his starry home — Linnseus from his flowery resting-place — and 
Werner and Hutton from their subterranean graves at the voice 
of Chalmers, to acknowledge that all they learned and elicited 
in their respective provinces has only served to show more 
clearly that Jesus of Nazareth is enthroned on the riches of the 
universe :" — and so prosaic an injunction to his hearers as that 
they should choose a residence within an easy distance of 
church, is magnificently draped by him as an exhortation to 
prefer a house " that basks in the sunshine of the countenance 
of God." Like all preachers of his class, he is more fertile in 
imaginative paraphrase than in close exposition, and in this 
way he gives us some remarkable fragments of what we may 
call the romance of Scripture, filling up the outline of the 
record with an elaborate coloring quite undreamed of by more 
literal minds. The serpent, he informs us, said to Eve, " Can 
it be so ? Surely you are mistaken, that God hath said you 
shall die, a creature so fair, so lovely, so beautiful. It is im- 
possible. The laws of nature and physical science tell you that 
my interpretation is correct ; you shall not die. I can tell you 
by my own experience as an angel that you shall be as gods, 
knowing good and evil." (" Apoc. Sketches," p. 294.) Again, 
according to Dr. dimming, Abel had so clear an idea of the 
Incarnation and Atonement, that when he offered his sacrifice 
" he must have said, *■ I feel myself a guilty sinner, and that in 
myself I cannot meet thee alive ; I lay on thine altar this vie 
tim, and I shed its blood as my testimony that mine should be 
shed ; and Ilook for forgiveness and undeserved mercy through 



70 THE ESSAYS OF 

him who is to bruise the serpent's head, and whose atonement 
this typifies.' " (" Occas. Disc." vol. i. p. 23.) Indeed, his 
productions are essentially ephemeral ; he is essentially a jour- 
nalist, who writes sermons instead of leading articles, who, in- 
stead of venting diatribes against her Majesty's Ministers, 
directs his power of invective against Cardinal Wiseman and 
the Puseyites ; instead of declaiming on public spirit, pero- 
rates on the " glory of God." We fancy he is called, in the 
more refined evangelical circles, an " intellectual preacher ;" 
by the plainer sort of Christians, a " flowery preacher ;" and 
we are inclined to think that the more spiritually minded class 
of believers, who look with greater anxiety for the kingdom of 
God within them than for the visible advent of Christ in 1864, 
will be likely to find Dr. Curaming's declamatory flights and 
historico-prophetical exercitations as little better than " clouts 
o' cauld parritch. " 

Such is our general impression from his writings after an at- 
tentive perusal. There are some particular characteristics 
which we shall consider more closely, but in doing so we must 
be understood as altogether declining any doctrinal discussion. 
We have no intention to consider the grounds of Dr. Cum- 
ming's dogmatic system, to examine the principles of his pro- 
phetic exegesis, or to question his opinion concerning the little 
horn, the river Euphrates, or the seven vials. We identify 
ourselves with no one of the bodies whom he regards it as his 
special mission to attack : we give our adhesion neither to 
Romanism, Puseyism, nor to that anomalous combination of 
opinions which he introduces to us under the name of infidel- 
ity. It is simply as spectators that we criticise Dr. Cumming's 
mode of warfare, and we concern ourselves less with what he 
holds to be Christian truth than with his manner of enforcing 
that truth, less with the doctrines he teaches than with the 
moral spirit and tendencies of his teaching. 

One of the most striking characteristics of Dr. Cumming's 
writings is unscrupulosity of statement. His motto apparently 
is, Christianitatem, quocunque modo, Christianitatem ; and the 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING : DR. CUM3IING. 71 

only system he includes under the term Christianity is Calvin- 
istic Protestantism. Experience has so long shown that the 
human brain is a congenial nidus for inconsistent beliefs that 
we do not pause to inquire how Dr. Gumming, who attributes 
the conversion of the unbelieving to the Divine Spirit, can 
think it necessary to co-operate with that Spirit by argumenta- 
tive white lies. Nor do we for a moment impugn the genuine- 
ness of his zeal for Christianity, or the sincerity of his convic- 
tion that the doctrines he preaches are necessary to salvation ; 
on the contrary, we regard the flagrant unveracity that we find 
on his pages as an indirect result of that conviction — as a 
result, namely, of the intellectual and moral distortion of 
view which is inevitably produced by assigning to dogmas, 
based on a very complex structure of evidence, the place and 
authority of first truths. A distinct appreciation of the value 
of evidence — in other words, the intellectual perception of truth 
— is more closely allied to truthfulness of statement, or the 
moral quality of veracity, than is generally admitted. There 
is not a more pernicious fallacy afloat, in common parlance, 
than the wide distinction made between intellect and morality. 
Amiable impulses without intellect, man may have in common 
with dogs and horses ; but morality, which is specifically 
human, is dependent on the regulation of feeling by intellect. 
All human beings who can be said to be in any degree moral 
have their impulses guided, not indeed always by their own in- 
tellect, but by the intellect of human beings who have gone 
before them, and created traditions and associations which have 
taken the rank of laws. Now that highest moral habit, the con- 
stant preference of truth, both theoretically and practically, pre- 
eminently demands the co-operation of the intellect with the 
impulses, as is indicated by the fact that it is only found in 
anything like completeness in the highest class of minds. In 
accordance with this we think it is found that, in proportion as 
religious sects exalt feeling above intellect, and believe them- 
selves to be guided by direct inspiration rather than by a spon- 
taneous exertion -of- their -faculties — that is,- in -proportion as 



72 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

they are removed from rationalism — their sense of truthfulness 
is misty and confused. No one can have talked to the more 
enthusiastic Methodists and listened to their stories of miracles 
without perceiving that they require no other passport to a 
statement than that it accords with their wishes and their 
general conception of God's dealings ; nay, they regard as a 
symptom of sinful scepticism an inquiry into the evidence for a 
story which they think unquestionably tends to the glory of 
God, and in retailing such stories, new particulars, further 
tending to his glory, are " borne in" upon their minds. Now, 
Dr. dimming, as we have said, is no enthusiastic pietist : 
within a certain circle — within the mill of evangelical ortho- 
doxy — his intellect is perpetually at work ; but that principle 
of sophistication which our friends the Methodists derive from 
the predominance of their pietistic feelings, is involved for him 
in the doctrine of verbal inspiration ; what is for them a state 
of emotion submerging the intellect, is with him a formula im- 
prisoning the intellect, depriving it of its proper function- — the 
free search for truth — and making it the mere servant-of-all-work 
to a foregone conclusion. Minds fettered by this doctrine no 
longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested 
by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture ; 
they do not search for facts, as such, but for facts that will 
bear out their doctrine. They become accustomed to reject the 
more direct evidence in favor of the less direct, and where 
adverse evidence reaches demonstration they must resort to de- 
vices and expedients in order to explain away contradiction. 
It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the per- 
ception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the 
man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the 
precipice of falsehood. 

We have entered into this digression for the sake of mitigat- 
ing the inference that is likely to be drawn from that charac- 
teristic of Dr. Cumming's works to which we have pointed. 
He is much in the same intellectual condition as that professor 
of Fadua, who, in order to disprove Galileo's discovery of 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING I DR. CUMMING. 73 

Jupiter's satellites, urged that as there were only seven metals 
there could not be more than seven planets — a mental condi- 
tion scarcely compatible with candor. And we may well sup- 
pose that if the professor had held the belief in seven planets, 
and no more, to be a necessary condition of salvation, his 
mental condition would have been so dazed that even if he had 
consented to look through Galileo's telescope, his eyes would 
have reported in accordance with his inward alarms rather than 
with the external fact. So long as a belief in propositions is 
regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth as 
such is not possible, any more than it is possible for a man 
who is swimming for his life to make meteorological observa- 
tions on the storm which threatens to overwhelm him. The 
sense of alarm and haste, the anxiety for personal safety, which 
Dr. Cumming insists upon as the proper religious attitude, 
unmans the nature, and allows no thorough, calm thinking no 
truly noble, disinterested feeling. Hence, we by no means 
suspect that the unscrupulosity of statement with which we 
charge Dr. Cumming, extends beyond the sphere of his theo- 
logical prejudices ; we do not doubt that, religion apart, he ap- 
preciates and practices veracity. 

A grave general accusation must be supported by details, 
and in adducing those we purposely select the most obvious 
cases of misrepresentation — such as require no argument to ex- 
pose them, but can be perceived at a glance. Among Dr. 
Cumming' s numerous books, one of the most notable for un- 
scrupulosity of statement is the " Manual of Christian Evi- 
dences," written, as he tells us in his Preface, not to give the 
deepest solutions of the difficulties in question, but to furnish 
Scripture Readers, City Missionaries, and Sunday School 
Teachers, with a " ready reply" to sceptical arguments. This 
announcement that readiness was the chief quality sought for 
in the solutions here given, modifies our inference from the 
other qualities which those solutions present ; and it is but fair 
to presume that when the Christian disputant is not in a hurry 
Dr. Cumming would recommend replied less ready and more 



74 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

veracious. Here is an example of what in another place* he 
tells his readers is " change in their pocket ... a little ready 
argument which they can employ, and therewith answer a fool 
according to his folly." From the nature of this argumenta- 
tive small coin, we are inclined to think Dr. Cumming under- 
stands answering a fool according to his folly to mean, giving 
him a foolish answer. We quote from the " Manual of Chris- 
tian Evidences," p. 62. 

" Some of the gods which the heathen worshipped were among the 
greatest monsters that ever walked the earth. Mercury was a thief ; 
and because he was an expert thief he was enrolled among the gods. 
Bacchus was a mere sensualist and drunkard, and therefore he was 
enrolled among the gods. Venus was a dissipated and abandoned 
courtesan, and therefore she was enrolled among the goddesses. 
Mars was a savage, that gloried in battle and in blood, and there- 
fore he was deified and enrolled among the gods." 

Does Dr. Cumming believe the purport of these sentences ? 
If so, this passage is worth handing down as his theory of the 
Greek myth — as a specimen of the astounding ignorance which 
was possible in a metropolitan preacher, a.d. 1854. And if 
he does not believe them . . . The inference must then be, 
that he thinks delicate veracity about the ancient Greeks is not 
a Christian virtue, but only a " splendid sin" of the unregen- 
erate. This inference is rendered the more probable by our 
finding, a little further on, that he is not more scrupulous 
about the moderns, if they come under his definition of " In- 
fidels." But the passage we are about to quote in proof of 
this has a worse quality than its discrepancy with fact. Who 
that has a spark of generous feeling, that rejoices in the pres- 
ence of good in a fellow-being, has not dwelt with pleasure on 
the thought that Lord Byron's unhappy career was ennobled 
and purified toward its close by a high and sympathetic pur- 
pose, by honest and energetic efforts for his fellow-men ? Who 
has not read with deep emotion those last pathetic lines, beau- 

* " Lect. on Daniel," p. 6. 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING : DK. CUMMING. 75 

tiful as the after-glow of sunset, in which love and resignation 
are mingled with something of a melancholy heroism ? Who 
has not lingered with compassion over the dying scene at Mis- 
solonghi — the sufferer's inability to make his farewell messages 
of love intelligible, and the last long hours of silent pain ? Yet 
for the sake of furnishing his disciples with a " ready reply,'' 
Dr. Cumming can prevail on himself to inoculate them with a 
bad-spirited falsity like the following : 

" We have one striking exhibition of an infidel's brightest thoughts, in 
some lines written in his dying moments by a man, gifted with great 
genius, capable of prodigious intellectual prowess, but of worthless 
principle, and yet more worthless practices — I mean the celebrated 
Lord Byron. He says : 

" 'Though gay companions o'er the bowl 
Dispel awhile the sense of ill, 
Though pleasure fills the maddening soul, 
The heart — the heart is lonely still. 

" 'Ay, but to die, and go, alas ! 

Where all have gone and all must go ; 
To be the Nothing that I was, 
Ere bprn to life and living woe ! 

"'Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, 
Count o'er thy days from anguish free, 
And know, whatever thou hast been, 
Tis something better not to be. 

" 'Nay, for myself, so dark my fate 

Through every turn of life hath been, 
Man and the world so much / hate, 
I care not when I quit the scene.' " 

It is difficult to suppose that Dr. Cumming can have been so 
grossly imposed upon — that he can be so ill-informed as really 
to believe that these lines were " written" by Lord Byron in 
his dying moments ; but, allowing him the full benefit of that 
possibility, how shall we explain his introduction of this feebly 
rabid doo-<rrel as " an infidel's brightest thoughts ?" 

as o o 

In marshalling the evidences of Christianity, Dr. Cumming 
directs most of his arguments against opinions that are either 



76 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

totally imaginary, or that belong to the past rather than to the 
present, while he entirely fails to meet the difficulties actually 
felt and urged by those who are uuable to accept Revelation. 
There can hardly be a stronger proof of misconception as to the 
character of free-thinking in the present day, than the recom- 
mendation of Leland's " Short and Easy Method with the 
Deists" — a method which is unquestionably short and easy for 
preachers disinclined to reconsider their stereotyped modes of 
thinking and arguing, but which has quite ceased to realize 
those epithets in the conversion of Deists. Yet Dr. Cumming 
not only recommends this book, but takes the trouble himself to 
write a feebler version of its arguments. For example, on the 
question of the genuineness and authenticity of the New Testa- 
ment writing's, he says : " If, therefore, at a period long sub- 
sequent to the death of Christ, a number of men had appeared 
in the world, drawn up a book which they christened by the 
name of the Holy Scripture, and recorded these things which 
appear in it as facts when they were only the fancies of their 
own imagination, surely the Jews would have instantly re- 
claimed that no such events transpired, that no such person 
as Jesus Christ appeared in their capital, and that their 
crucifixion of Him, and their alleged evil treatment of his 
aposlles, were mere fictions."* It is scarcely necessary 
to say that, in such argument as this, Dr. Cumming is 
beating the air. He is meeting a hypothesis which no 
one holds, and totally missing the real question. The only 
type of " infidel " whose existence Dr. Cumming recognizes 
is that fossil personage who " calls the Bible a lie and a for- 
gery." He seems to be ignorant — or he chooses to ignore 
the fact — that there is a large body of eminently instructed and 
earnest men who regard the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures 
as a series of historical documents, to be dealt with accord- 
ing to the rules of historical criticism, and that an equal- 
ly large number of men, who are not historical critics, find 

* "Man of Ev." p. 81. 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING : DR. CUMMING. 77 

the dogmatic scheme built on the letter of the Scriptures op- 
posed to their profoundest moral convictions. Dr. Cum- 
ming's infidel is a man who, because his life is vicious, tries to 
convince himself that there is no God, and that Christianity is 
an imposture, but who is all the while secretly conscious that 
he is opposing the truth, and cannot help " letting out" admis- 
sions " that the Bible is the Book of God." We are favored 
with the following " Creed of the Infidel :" 

" I believe that there is no God, but that matter is God, and God is 
matter ; and that it is no matter whether there is any God or not. I 
believe also that the world was not made, but that the world made 
itself, or that it had no beginning, and that it will last forever. I 
believe that man is a beast ; that the soul is the body, and that the 
body is the soul ; and that after death there is neither body nor 
soul. I believe there is no religion, that natural religion is the only 
religion, and all religion unnatural. I believe not in Moses ; I believe 
in the first philosophers. I believe not in the evangelists ; I be- 
lieve in Chubb, Collins, Toland, Tindal, and Hobbes. I believe in 
Lord Bolingbroke, and I believe not in St. Paul. I believe not in 
revelation ; 1 believe in tradition ; I believe in the Talmud ; 1 believe in the 
Koran ; I believe not in the Bible. I believe in Socrates ; I believe 
in Confucius ; I believe in Mahomet ; I believe not in Christ. And 
lastly, J believe in all unbelief." 

The intellectual and moral monster whose creed is this com- 
plex web of contradictions, is, moreover, according to Dr. 
Cumming, a being who unites much simplicity and imbecility 
with his Satanic hardihood — much tenderness of conscience 
with his obdurate vice. Hear the " proof :" 

" I once met with an acute and enlightened infidel, with whom I 
reasoned day after day, and for hours together ; I submitted to him 
the internal, the external, and the experimental evidences, but made 
no impression on his scorn and unbelief. At length I entertained a 
suspicion that there was something morally, rather than intellectu- 
ally wrong, and that the bias was not in the intellect, but in the 
heart ; one day therefore I said to him, ' I must now state my con- 
viction, and you may call me uncharitable, but duty compels me ; 
you are living in some known and gross sin.' The man's countenance 
became pale; he bowed and left me." — " Man. of Evidences," p. 254. 



78 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

Here we have the remarkable psychological phenomenon of 
an " acute and enlightened " man who, deliberately purposing 
to indulge in a favorite sin, and regarding the Gospel with 
scorn and unbelief, is, nevertheless, so much more scrupulous 
than the majority of Christians, that he cannot " embrace sin 
and the Gospel simultaneously ;" who is so alarmed at the 
Gospel in which he does not believe, that he cannot be easy 
without trying to crush it ; whose acuteness and enlightenment 
suggest to him, as a means of crushing the Gospel, to argue 
from day to day with Dr. Cumming • and who is withal so 
na'ive that he is taken by surprise when Dr. Cumming, failing 
in argument, resorts to accusation, and so tender in conscience 
that, at the mention of his sin, he turns pale and leaves the 
spot. If there be any human mind in existence capable of 
holding Dr. Cumming's " Creed of the Infidel," of at the 
same time believing in tradition and " believing in all un- 
belief," it must be the mind of the infidel just described, for 
whose existence we have Dr. Cumming's ex officio word as a 
theologian ; and to theologians we may apply what Sancho 
Panza says of the bachelors of Salamanca, that they never tell 
lies — except when it suits their purpose. 

The total absence from Dr. Cumming's theological mind of 
any demarcation between fact and rhetoric is exhibited in 
another passage, where he adopts the dramatic form : 

" Ask the peasant on the hills — and I have asked amid the mountains 
of Braemar and Deeside — " How do you know that this book is divine, 
and that the religion you profess is true ? You never read Paley ? ' 
' No, I never heard of him.' — ' You have never read Butler ? ' ' No, I 
have never heard of him. ' — ' Nor Chalmers ? ' ' No, I do not know 
him.' — ' You have never read any books on evidence ? ' * No, I have 
read no such books.' — ' Then, how do you know this book is true? ' 
1 Know it ! Tell me that the Dee, the Clunie, and the Garrawalt, the 
streams at my feet, do not run ; that the winds do not sigh amid the 
gorges of these blue hills ; that the sun does not kindle the peaks of 
Loch-na-Gar ; tell me my heart does not beat, and I will believe you ; 
but do not tell me the Bible is not divine. I have found its truth 
illuminating my footsteps ; its consolations sustaining my heart. May 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING '. DR. CUMMING. 79 

my tongue cleave to my mouth' s roof, and my right hand forget its 
cunning, if I ewevy deny what is my deepest inner experience, that 
this blessed book is the book of God.' " — " Church Before the 
Flood," p. 35. 

Dr. dimming is so slippery and lax in his mode of presenta- 
tion that we find it impossible to gather whether he means to 
assert that this is what a peasant on the mountains of Braemar 
did say, or that it is what such a peasant would say : in the 
one case, the passage may be taken as a measure of his truth- 
fulness ; in the other, of his judgment. 

His own faith, apparently, has not been altogether intuitive, 
like that of his rhetorical peasant, for he tells us (" Apoc. 
Sketches," p. 405) that he has himself experienced what it is to 
have religious doubts. " I was tainted while at the Uni- 
versity by this spirit of scepticism. I thought Christianity 
might not be true. The very possibility of its being true was 
the thought I felt I must meet and settle. Conscience could 
give me no peace till I had settled it. I read, and I read from 
that day, for fourteen or fifteen years, till this, and now I am 
as convinced, upon the clearest evidence, that this book is the 
book of God as that I now address you." This experience, 
however, instead of impressing on him the fact that doubt may 
be the stamp of a truth-loving mind — that sunt quibus non 
credidisse honor est, et jidei futures pignus — seems to have 
produced precisely the contrary effect. It has not enabled 
him even to conceive the condition of a mind " perplext in 
faith but pure in deeds," craving light, yearning for a faith that 
will harmonize and cherish its highest powers and aspirations, 
but unable to find that faith in dogmatic Christianity. His 
own doubts apparently were of a different kind. Nowhere in 
his pages have we found a humble, candid, sympathetic 
attempt to meet the difficulties that may be felt by an 
ingenuous mind. Everywhere he supposes that the doubter is 
hardened, conceited, consciously shutting his eyes to the light 
— a fool who is to be answered according to his folly — that is, 
with ready replies made up of reckless assertions, of apocryphal 



80 THE ESSAYS OF " GEOBGE ELIOT." 

anecdotes, and, where other resources fail, of vituperative 
imputation. As to the reading which he has prosecuted for 
fifteen years — either it has left him totally ignorant of the 
relation which his own religious creed hears to the criticism 
and philosophy of the nineteenth century, or he systematically 
blinks that criticism and that philosophy ; and instead of 
honestly and seriously endeavoring to meet and solve what he 
knows to be the real difficulties, contents himself with setting 
up popinjays to shoot at, for the sake of confirming the 
ignorance and winning the heap admiration of his evangelical 
hearers and readers. Like the Catholic preacher who, after 
throwing down his cap and apostrophizing it as Luther, turned 
to his audience and said, " You see this heretical fellow has 
not a word to say for himself," Dr. dimming, having drawn 
his ugly portrait of the infidel, and put arguments of a con- 
venient quality into his mouth, finds a " short and easy 
method " of confounding this " croaking frog." 

In his treatment of infidels, we imagine he is guided by a 
mental process which may be expressed in the following 
syllogism : Whatever tends to the glory of God is true ; it is 
for the glory of God that infidels should be as bad as pos- 
sible ; therefore, whatever tends to show that infidels are as bad 
as possible is true. All infidels, he tells us, have been men of 
" gross and licentious lives." Is there not some well-known 
unbeliever, David Hume, for example, of whom even Dr. 
Cumming's readers may have heard as an exception ? No 
matter. Some one suspected that he was not an exception, 
and as that suspicion tends to the glory of God, it is one for a 
Christian to entertain. (See " Man. of Ew," p. 73.) — If we 
were unable to imagine this kind of self-sophistication, we 
should be obliged to suppose that, relying on the ignorance of 
his evangelical disciples, he fed them with direct and conscious 
falsehoods. " Voltaire," he informs them, " declares there is 
no God ;" he was '■ an antitheist, that is one who deliberately 
and avowedly opposed and hated God ; who swore in his 
blasphemy that he would dethrone him ;" and " advocated 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING : DR. GUMMING. 81 

the very depths of the lowest sensuality." With regard to 
many statements of a similar kind, equally at variance with 
truth, in Dr. Cumming's volumes, we presume that he has been 
misled by hearsay or by the second-hand character of his 
acquaintance with free-thinking literature. An evangelical 
preacher is not obliged to be well-read. Here, however, is a 
case which the extremest supposition of educated ignorance 
will not reach. Even books of " evidences " quote from 
Voltaire the line — 

" Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer ;" 

even persons fed on the mere whey and buttermilk of literature 
must know that in philosophy Voltaire was nothing if not 
a theist — must know that he wrote not against God, but 
against Jehovah, the God of the Jews, whom he believed to be 
a false God — must know that to say Voltaire was an atheist 
on this ground is as absurd as to say that a Jacobite opposed 
hereditary monarchy because he declared the Brunswick 
family had no title to the throne. That Dr. Cumming should 
repeat the vulgar fables about Voltaire's death is merely what 
we might expect from the specimens we have seen of his 
illustrative stories. A man whose accouuts of his own ex- 
perience are apocryphal is not likely to put borrowed nar- 
ratives to any severe test. 

The alliance between intellectual and moral perversion is 
strikingly typified by the way in which he alternates from the 
unveracious to the absurd, from misrepresentation to con- 
tradiction. Side by side with the abduction of " facts" such 
as those we have quoted, we find him arguing on one page that 
the Trinity was too grand a doctrine to have been conceived 
by man, and was therefore Divine ; and on another page, that 
the Incarnation had been preconceived by man, and is therefore 
to be accepted as Divine. But we are less concerned with the 
fallacy of his " ready replies" than with their falsity ; and 
even of this we can only afford space for a very few speci- 
mens. Here is one : M There is a thousand times more proof 



82 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

that the gospel of John was written by him than there is that 
the AvaQaoLS was written by Xenophon, or the Ars Poetica 
by Horace. " If Dr. Gumming had chosen Plato's Epistles or 
Anacreon's Poems instead of the Anabasis or the Ars Poetica, 
he would have reduced the extent of the falsehood, and would 
have furnished a ready reply which would have been equally 
effective with his Sunday-school teachers and their disputants. 
Hence we conclude this prodigality of misstatement, this 
exuberance of mendacity, is an effervescence of zeal in majorem 
gloriam Dei. Elsewhere he tells us that " the idea of the 
author of the ' Vestiges ' is, that man is the development of 
a monkey, that the monkey is the embryo man, so that if 
you keep a baboon long enough, it will develop itself into a man." 
How well Dr. Cumming has qualified himself to judge of the 
ideas in " that very unphilosophical book," as he pronounces 
it, may be inferred from the fact that he implies the author 
of the " Vestiges" to have originated the nebular hypothesis. 

In the volume from which the last extract is taken, even the 
hardihood of assertion is surpassed by the suicidal character of 
the argument. It is called " The Church before the Flood," 
and is devoted chiefly to the adjustment of the question 
between the Bible and Geology. Keeping within the limits 
we have prescribed to ourselves, we do not enter into the matter 
of this discussion ; we merely pause a little over the volume in 
order to point out Dr. Gumming' s mode of treating the 
question. He first tells us that " the Bible has not a single 
scientific error in it ;" that " its slightest intimations of scien- 
tific principles or natural phenomena have in every instance been 
demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true," and he asks : 

" How is it that Moses, with no greater education than the Hindoo 
or the ancient philosopher, has written his book, touching science at 
a thousand points, so accurately that scientific research has discov- 
ered no flaws in it ; and yet in those investigations which have taken 
place in more recent centuries, it has not been shown that he has 
committed one single error, or made one solitary assertion which 
can be proved by the maturest science, or by the most eagle-eyed 
philosopher, to be incorrect, scientifically or historically?" 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING : DR. CUMMING. 83 

According to this the relation of the Bible to science should 
be one of the strong points of apologists for revelation : the 
scientific accuracy of Moses should stand at the head of their 
evidences ; and they might urge with some cogency, that since 
Aristotle, who devoted himself to science, and lived many 
ages after Moses, does little else than err ingeniously, this fact, 
that the Jewish Lawgiver, though touching science at a 
thousand points, has written nothing that has not been 
" demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true," is an irrefrag- 
able proof of his having derived his knowledge from a super- 
natural source. How does it happen, then, that Dr. Cumming 
forsakes this strong position ? How is it that we find him, 
some pages further on, engaged in reconciling Genesis with the 
discoveries of science, by means of imaginative hypotheses and 
feats of " interpretation ?" Surely, that which has been 
demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true does not require 
hypothesis and critical argument, in order to show that it may 
possibly agree with those very discoveries by means of w T hich 
its exact and strict truth has been demonstrated. And why 
should Dr. Cumming suppose, as we shall presently find him 
supposing, that men of science hesitate to accept the Bible, 
because it appears to contradict their discoveries ? By his 
own statement, that appearance of contradiction does not 
exist ; on the contrary, it has been demonstrated that the 
Bible precisely agrees with their discoveries. Perhaps, how- 
ever, in saying of the Bible that its " slightest intimations of 
scientific principles or natural phenomena have in every instance 
been demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true," Dr. 
Cumming merely means to imply that theologians have found 
out a way of explaining the biblical text so that it no longer, 
in their opinion, appears to be in contradiction with the dis- 
coveries of science. One of two things, therefore : either he 
uses language without the slightest appreciation of its real 
meaning, or the assertions he makes on one page are directly 
contradicted bv the arguments he urges on another. 

Dr. Cumming' s principles — or, we should rather say, con- 



84 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

fused notions — of biblical interpretation, as exhibited in this 
volume, are particularly significant of his mental calibre. He 
says (" Church before the Flood," p. 93) : u Men of science, 
who are full of scientific investigation and enamored of scien- 
tific discovery, will hesitate before they accept a book which, 
they think, contradicts the plainest and the most unequivocal 
disclosures they have made in the bowels of the earth, or 
among the stars of the sky. To all these we. answer, as we 
have already indicated, there is not the least dissonance between 
God's written book and the most mature discoveries of 
geological science. One thing, however, there may be : there 
may be a contradiction between the discoveries of geology and our 
'preconceived interpretations of the Bible. But this is not 
because the Bible is wrong, but because our interpretation is 
wrong." (The italics in all cases are our own.) 

Elsewhere he says : " It seems to me plainly evident that 
the record of Genesis, when read fairly, and not in the light of 
our prejudices — and mind you, the essence of Popery is to read 
the Bible in the light of our opinions, instead of viewing our 
opinions in the light of the Bible, in its plain and obvious sense 
— falls in perfectly with the assertion of geologists." 

On comparing these two passages, we gather that when Dr. 
Cumraing, under stress of geological discovery, assigns to the 
biblical text a meaning entirely different from that which, on his 
own showing, was universally ascribed to it for more than three 
thousand years, he regards himself as " viewing his opinions in 
the light of the Bible in its plain and obvious sense !" Now 
he is reduced to one of two alternatives : either he must hold 
that the " plain and obvious meaning" of the whole Bible 
differs from age to age, so that the criterion of its meaning lies 
iu the sum of knowledge possessed by each successive age — the 
Bible being an elastic garment for the growing thought of 
mankind ; or he must hold that some portions are amenable 
to this criterion, and others not so. In the former case, he 
accepts the principle of interpretation adopted by the early 
German rationalists ; in the latter case he has to show a 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING I DR. CUMMING. 85 

further criterion by which we can judge what parts of the 
Bible are elastic and what rigid. If he says that the inter- 
pretation of the text is rigid wherever it treats of doctrines 
necessary to salvation, we answer, that for doctrines to be 
necessary to salvation they must first be true ; and in order to 
be true, according to his own principle, they must be founded 
on a correct interpretation of the biblical text. Thus he makes 
the necessity of doctrines to salvation the criterion of infallible 
interpretation, and infallible interpretation the criterion of 
doctrines being necessary to salvation. He is whirled round 
in a circle, having, by admitting the principle of novelty in 
interpretation, completely deprived himself of a basis. That 
he should seize the very moment in which he is most palpably 
betraying that he has no test of biblical truth beyond his own 
opinion, as an appropriate occasion for flinging the rather 
novel reproach against Popery that its essence is to " read the 
Bible in the light of our opinions," would be an almost 
pathetic self-exposure, if it were not disgusting. Imbecility 
that is not even meek, ceases to be pitiable, and becomes 
simply odious. 

Parenthetic lashes of this kind against Popery are very 
frequent with Dr. Gumming, and occur even in his more 
devout passages, where their introduction must surely disturb 
the spiritual exercises of his hearers. Indeed, Roman Catholics 
fare worse with him even than infidels. Infidels are the small 
vermin — the mice to be bagged en passant. The main object 
of his chase — the rats which are to be nailed up as trophies — 
are the Roman Catholics. Romanism is the masterpiece of 
Satan ; but reassure yourselves ! Dr. dimming has been 
created. Antichrist is enthroned in the Vatican ; but he is 
stoutly withstood by the Boanerges of Crown-court. The 
personality of Satan, as might be expected, is a very prominent 
tenet in Dr. Cumming's discourses ; those who doubt it are, 
he thinks, " generally specimens of the victims of Satan as a 
triumphant seducer ;" and it is through the medium of this 
dotrtrine that he habitually contemplates Roman Catholfcs. 



86 THE ESSAYS OF ''GEORGE ELIOT." 

They are the puppets of which the devil holds the strings. It 
is only exceptionally that he speaks of them as fellow-men, 
acted on by the same desires, fears, and hopes as himself ; his 
rule is to hold them up to his hearers as foredoomed instru- 
ments of Satan and vessels of wrath. If he is obliged to admit 
that they are "no shams," that they are "thoroughly in 
earnest" — that is because they are inspired by hell, because 
they are under an "infra-natural" influence. If their mis- 
sionaries are found wherever Protestant missionaries go, this 
zeal in propagating their faith is not in them a consistent 
virtue, as it is in Protestants, but a "melancholy fact," 
affording additional evidence that they are instigated and 
assisted by the devil. And Dr. dimming is inclined to think 
that they work miracles, because that is no more than might be 
expected from the known ability of Satan who inspires them.* 
He admits, indeed, that " there is a fragment of the Church 
of Christ in the very bosom of that awful apostasy, "f and that 
there are members of the Church of Rome in glory ; but this 
admission is rare and episodical — is a declaration, pro forma, 
about as influential on the general disposition and habits as an 
aristocrat's profession of democracy. 

This leads us to mention another conspicuous characteristic 
of Dr. Cumming's teaching — the absence of genuine charity. 
It is true that he makes large profession of tolerance and 
liberality within a certain circle ; he exhorts Christians to 
unity ; he would have Churchmen fraternize with Dissenters, 
and exhorts these two branches of God's family to defer the 
settlement of their differences till the millennium. But the 
love thus taught is the love of the clan, which is the correlative 
of antagonism to the rest of mankind. It is not sympathy and 
helpfulness toward men as men, but toward men as Chris- 
tians, and as Christians in the sense of a small minority. 
Dr. Cumming's religion may demand a tribute of love, but it 
gives a charter to hatred ; it may enjoin charity, but it fosters 

* " Signs of the Times," p. 38. 
f " Apoc. Sketches," p. 243. 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING : BR. CUMMING. 87 

all uncharitableness. If I believe that God tells me to love 
my enemies, but at the same time hates His own enemies and 
requires me to have one will with Him, which has the larger 
scope, love or hatred ? And Ave refer to those pages of Dr. 
Cumming's in which he opposes Roman Catholics, Puseyites, 
and infidels — pages which form the larger proportion of what 
lie has published — for proof that the idea of God which both 
the logic and spirit of his discourses keep present to his 
hearers, is that of a God who bates his enemies, a God who 
teaches love by fierce denunciations of wrath — a God who 
encourages obedience to his precepts by elaborately revealing 
to us that his own government is in precise opposition to those 
precepts. We know the usual evasions on this subject. We 
know Dr. dimming would say that even Roman Catholics are 
to be loved and succored as men ; that he would help even that 
'.' unclean spirit," Cardinal Wiseman, out of a ditch. But 
who that is in the slightest degree acquainted with the action 
of the human mind will believe that any genuine and large 
charity can grow out of an exercise of love which is always to 
have an arriere-pensee of hatred ? Of what quality would be 
the conjugal love of a husband who loved his spouse as a wife, 
but hated her as a woman ? It is reserved for the regenerate 
mind, according to Dr. Cumming's conception of it, to be 
M wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral, in a 
moment." Precepts of charity uttered with a faint breath at 
the end of a sermon are perfectly futile, when all the force of 
the lungs has been spent in keeping the hearer's mind fixed on 
the conception of his fellow-men not as fellow-sinners and 
fellow-sutlerers, but as agents of hell, as automata through 
whom Satan plays his game upon earth — not on objects which 
call forth their reverence, their love, their hope of good even in 
the most strayed and perverted, but on a minute identification 
of human things with such symbols as the scarlet whore, the 
beast out of the abyss, scorpions whose sting is in their tails, 
men who have the mark of the beast, and unclean spirits like 
frogs. You might as well attempt to educate the child's sense 



88 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

of beauty by hanging its nursery with the horrible and 
grotesque pictures in which the early painters represented the 
Last Judgment, as expect Christian graces to flourish on that 
prophetic interpretation which Dr. dimming offers as the 
principal nutriment of his flock. Quite apart from the critical 
basis of that interpretation, quite apart from the degree of 
truth there may be in Dr. Cumming's prognostications — 
questions into which we do not choose to enter — his use of 
prophecy must be a priori condemned in the judgment of right- 
minded persons, by its results as testified in the net moral 
effect of his sermons. The best minds that accept Christianity 
as a divinely inspired system, believe that the great end of 
the Gospel is not merely the saving but the educating of men's 
souls, the creating within them of holy dispositions, the sub- 
duing of egoistical pretensions, and the perpetual enhancing of 
the desire that the will of God — a will synonymous with good- 
ness and truth — may be done on earth. But what relation to all 
this has a system of interpretation which keeps the mind of 
the Christian in the position of a spectator at a gladiatorial 
show, of which Satan is the wild beast in the shape of the 
great red dragon, and two thirds of mankind the victims — the 
whole provided and got up by God for the edification of the 
saints ? The demonstration that the Second Advent is at hand, 
if true, can have no really holy, spiritual effect ; the highest 
state of mind inculcated by the Gospel is resignation to the 
disposal of God's providence — " Whether we live, we live 
unto the Lord ; whether we die, we die unto the Lord " — not 
an eagerness to see a temporal manifestation which shall 
confound the enemies of God and give exaltation to the saints ; 
it is to dwell in Christ by spiritual communion with his nature, 
not to fix the date when He shall appear in the sky. Dr. 
Cumming's delight in shadowing forth the downfall of the 
Man of Sin, in prognosticating the battle of Gog and Magog, 
and in advertising the pre-millennial Advent, is simply the 
transportation of political passions on to a so-called religious 
platform ; it is the anticipation of the triumph of " our party," 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING : DK. CCMillNG. 89 

accomplished by our principal men being " sent for" into tlio 
clouds. Let us be understood to speak in all seriousness. If 
we were in seaich of amusement, we should not seek for it by 
examining Dr. Cumming's works in order to ridicule them. 
We are simply discharging a disagreeable duty in delivering 
our opinion that, judged by the highest standard even of 
orthodox Christianity, they are little calculated to produce — 
" A closer walk with God, 

A calm and heavenly frame ;" 

but are more likely to nourish egoistic complacency and pre- 
tension, a hard and condemnatory spirit toward one's fellow- 
men, and a busy occupation with the minutias of events, instead 
of a reverent contemplation of great facts and a wise applica- 
tion of great principles. It would be idle to consider Dr. 
Cumming's theory of prophecy in any other light ; as a 
philosophy of history or a specimen of biblical interpretation, 
it bears about the same relation to the extension of genuine 
knowledge as the astrological " house" in the heavens bears to 
the true structure and relations of the universe. 

The slight degree in which Dr. Cumming's faith is imbued 
with truly human sympathies is exhibited in the way he treats 
the doctrine of Eternal Punishment. Here a little of that readi- 
ness to strain the letter of the Scriptures which he so often 
manifests when his object is to prove a point against Roman- 
ism, would have been an amiable frailty if it had been applied 
on the side of mercy. When he is bent on proving that the 
prophecy concerning the Man of Sin, in the Second Epistle to 
the Thessalonians, refers to the Pope, he can extort from the 
innocent word nadioai the meaning cathedrize, though why we 
are to txanslatc " He as God cathedrizes in the temple of 
God," any more than we are to translate u cathedrize here, 
while I go and pray yonder," it is for Dr. dimming to show 
more clearly than he has yet done. But when rigorous lit- 
erality will favor the conclusion that the greater proportion of 
the human race will be eternally miserable — then he is rigor- 
ously literal. 



90 THE ESSAY3 OF "GEORGE ELIOT.' ' 

He says : " The Greek words, eU rove; alcovag tcjv al&vov, 
here translated ' everlasting,' signify literally ' unto the ages 
of ages ; alec &v, * always being,' that is, everlasting, cease- 
less existence. Plato uses the word in this sense when he says, 
' The gods that live forever.' But I must also admit that 
this word is used several times in a limited extent — as for in- 
stance, 'The everlasting hills.' Of course this does not mean 
that there never will be a time when the hills will cease to 
stand ; the expression here is evidently figurative, but it 
implies eternity. The hills shall remain as long as the earth 
lasts, and no hand has power to remove them but that Eternal 
One which first called them into being ; so the state of the soul 
remains the same after death as long as the soul exists, and 
no one has power to alter it. The same word is often applied 
to denote the existence of God — ' the Eternal God. ' Can we 
limit the word when applied to him ? Because occasionally 
used in a limited sense, we must not infer it is always so. 
' Everlasting ' plainly means in Scripture ' without end ; ' it is 
only to be explained figuratively when it is evident it cannot be 
interpreted in any other way/ ' 

We do not discuss whether Dr. Cumming's interpretation 
accords with the meaning of the New Testament writers : we 
simply point to the fact that the text becomes elastic for him 
when he wants freer play for his prejudices, while he makes it 
an adamantine barrier against the admission that mercy will 
ultimately triumph — that God, i.e., Love, will be all in all. 
He assures us that he does not " delight to dwell on the misery 
of the lost :" and we believe him. That misery does not 
seem to be a question of feeling with him, either one way or 
the other. He does not merely resign himself to the awful 
mystery of eternal punishment ; he contends for it. Do we 
object, he asks,* to everlasting happiness ? then why object to 
everlasting misery ? — reasoning which is perhaps felt to be 
cogent by theologians who anticipate the everlasting happiness 
for themselves, and the everlasting misery for their neighbors, 

* " Man. of Christ. Ev." p. 184. 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING : DR. CUMMING. 91 

Tlie compassion of some Christians has been glad to take 
refuge in the opinion that the Bible allows the supposition of 
annihilation for the impenitent ; but the rigid sequence of Dr. 
Cumming's reasoning will not admit of this idea. He sees 
that flax is made into linen, and linen into paper ; that paper, 
when burned, partly ascends as smoke and then again descends 
in rain, or in dust and carbon. " Not one particle of the 
original flax is lost, although there may be not one particle that 
has not undergone an entire change : annihilation is not, but 
change of form is. It will be thus with our bodies at tlie resur- 
rection. The death of the body means not annihilation. 
Not one feature of the face will be annihilated." Having 
established the perpetuity of the body by this close and clear 
analogy, namely, that as there is a total change in the particles 
of flax in consequence of which they no longer appear as flax, 
so there will not be a total change in the particles of the 
human body, but they will reappear as the human body, he 
does not seem to consider that the perpetuity of the body 
involves the perpetuity of the soul, but requires separate 
evidence for this, and finds such evidence by begging the very 
question at issue — namely, by asserting that the text of the 
Scripture implies " the perpetuity of the punishment of the 
lost, and the consciousness of the punishment which they 
endure." Yet it is drivelling like this which is listened to and 
lauded as eloquence by hundreds, and which a Doctor of 
Divinity can believe that he has his " reward as a saint" for 
preaching and publishing ! 

One more characteristic of Dr. Cumming's writings, and we 
have done. This is the perverted moral judgment that every- 
where reigns in them. Not that this perversion is peculiar to 
Dr. Cumming : it belongs to the dogmatic system which he 
shares with all evangelical believers. But the abstract 
tendencies of systems are represented in very different de- 
grees, according to the different characters of those who 
embrace them ; just as the same food tells differently on dif- 
ferent constitutions : and there are certain qualities in Dr. 



92 THE ESSAYS OF 

Gumming that cause the perversion of which we speak to 
exhibit itself with peculiar prominence in his teaching. A 
single extract will enable us to explain what we mean : 

" The ' thoughts ' are evil. If it were possible for human eye to 
discern and to detect the thoughts that flutter around the heart of an 
nnregenerate man — to mark their hue and their multitude, it would 
be found that they are indeed ' evil.' "We speak not of the thief, and 
the murderer, and the adulterer, and such like, whose crimes draw 
down the cognizance of earthly tribunals, and whose unenviable char- 
acter it is to take the lead in the paths of sin ; but we refer to the 
men who are marked out by their practice of many of the seemliest 
moralities of life — by the exercise of the kindliest affections, and the 
interchange of the sweetest reciprocities — and of these men, if unre- 
newed and unchanged, we pronounce that their thoughts are evil. 
To ascertain this, we must refer to the object around which our 
thoughts ought continually to circulate. The Scriptures assert that 
this object is the glory of God ; that for this we ought to think, to act, 
and to speak ; and that in thus thinking, acting, and speaking, there 
is involved the purest and most endearing bliss. Now it will be found 
true of the most amiable men, that with all their good society and 
kindliness of heart, and all their strict and unbending integrity, they 
never or rarely think of the glory of God. The question never occurs 
to them — Will this redound to the glory of God ? Will this make his 
name more known, his being more loved, his praise more sung? 
And just inasmuch as their every thought comes short of this lofty 
aim, in so much does it come short of good, and entitle itself to the 
character of evil. If the glory of God is not the absorbing and the 
influential aim of their thoughts, then they are evil ; but God's glory 
never enters into their minds. They are amiable, because it chances 
to be one of the constitutional tendencies of their individual charac- 
ter, left uneffaced by the Fall ; and they are just and upright, because 
they have perhaps no occasion to be otherwise, or find it subservient to their 
interests to maintain such a character." — " Occ. Disc." vol. i. p. 8. 

Again we read (Ibid. p. 236) : 

" There are traits in the Christian character which the mere 
worldly man cannot understand. He can understand the outward 
morality, but he cannot understand the inner spring of it ; he can 
understand Dorcas' liberality to the poor, but he cannot penetrate 
the ground of Dorcas' liberality. Some men give to the poor because they 
are ostentatious, or because they think the poor will ultimately avenge their 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING I DR. CUMMING. 93 

neglect ; but the Christian gives to the poor, not only because he has sensi- 
bilities like other men, but because inasmuch as ye did it to the least of 
these my brethren ye did it unto me." 

Before entering on the more general question involved in 
these quotations, we must point to the clauses we have marked 
with italics, where Dr. Camming appears to express sentiments 
which, we are happy to think, are not shared by the majority 
of his brethren in the faith. Dr. Cumming, it seems, is 
unable to conceive that the natural man can have any other 
motive for being just and upright than that it is useless to be 
otherwise, or that a character for honesty is profitable ; 
according to his experience, between the feelings of ostenta- 
tion and selfish alarm and the feeling of love to Christ, there 
lie no sensibilities which can lead a man to relieve want. 
Granting, as we should prefer to think, that it is Dr. Cum- 
ming's exposition of his sentiments which is deficient rather 
than his sentiments themselves, still, the fact that the deficiency 
lies precisely here, and that he can overlook it not only in the 
haste of oral delivery but in the examination of proof-sheets, 
is strongly significant of his mental bias— of the faint degree 
in which he sympathizes with the disinterested elements of 
human feeling, and of the fact, which we are about to dwell 
upon, that those feelings are totally absent from his religious 
theory. Now, Dr. Cumming invariably assumes that, in ful- 
minating against those who differ from him, he is standing on a 
moral elevation to which they are compelled reluctantly to look 
up ; that his theory of motives and conduct is in its loftiness 
and purity a perpetual rebuke to their low and vicious desires 
and practice. It is time he should be told that the reverse is 
the fact ; that there are men who do not merely cast a super- 
ficial glance at his doctrine, and fail to see its beauty or 
justice, but who, after a close consideration of that doctrine, 
pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development, and 
therefore positively noxious. Dr. Cumming is fond of 
showing up the teaching of Romanism, and accusing it of 
undermining true morality : it is time he should be told that 



94 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT.' ' 

there is a large body, both of thinkers and practical men, who 
hold precisely the same opinion of his own teaching — with this 
difference, that they do not regard it as the inspiration of 
Satan, but as the natural crop of a human mind where the soil 
is chiefly made up of egoistic passions and dogmatic beliefs. 

Dr. Cumming's theory, as we have seen, is that actions are 
good or evil according as they are prompted or not prompted 
by an exclusive reference to the " glory of God." God, then, 
in Dr. Cumming's conception, is a being who has no pleasure 
in the exercise of love and truthfulness and justice, considered 
as affecting the well-being of his creatures ; He has satisfaction 
in us only in so far as we exhaust our motives and dispositions 
of all relation to our fellow-beings, and replace sympathy with 
men by anxiety for the " glory of God." The deed of Grace 
Darling, when she took a boat in the storm to rescue drowning 
men and women, was not good if it was only compassion that 
nerved her arm and impelled her to brave death for the chance 
of saving others ; it was only good if she asked herself — Will 
this redound to the glory of God ? The man who endures 
tortures rather than betray a trust, the man who spends years 
in toil in order to discharge an obligation from which the law 
declares him free, must be animated not by the spirit of fidelity 
to his fellow man, but by a desire to make " the name of God 
more known." The sweet charities of domestic life — the 
ready hand and the soothing word in sickness, the forbearance 
toward frailties, the prompt helpfulness in all efforts and 
sympathy in all joys, are simply evil if they result from a 
" constitutional tendency," or from dispositions disciplined by 
the experience of suffering and the perception of moial loveli- 
ness. A wife is not to devote herself to her husband out of 
love to him and a sense of the duties implied by a close 
relation — she is to be a faithful wife for the glory of God ; if 
she feels her natural affections welling up too strongly, she is 
to repress them ; it will not do to act from natural affection — 
she must think of the glory of God. A man is to guide his 
affairs with energy and discretion, not from an honest desire to 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING '. DR. CUMMING. 95 

fulfil liis responsibilities as a member of society and a father, 
but — that " God's praise may be sung." Dr. Cumming's 
Christian pays his debts for the glory of God ; were it not for 
the coercion of that supreme motive, it would be evil to pay 
them. A man is not to be just from a feeling of justice ; he 
is not to help his fellow-men out of good-will to his fellow- 
men ; he is not to be a tender husband and father out of 
affection : all these natural muscles and fibres are to be torn 
away and replaced by a patent steel-spring — anxiety for the 
" glory of God." 

Happily, the constitution of human nature forbids the com- 
plete prevalence of such a theory. Fatally powerful as religious 
systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider than 
religious systems, and though dogmas may hamper, they cannot 
absolutely repress its growth : build walls round the living tree 
as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give 
w r ay before the slow and sure operation of the sap. But next 
to the hatred of the enemies of God which is the principle of 
persecution, there perhaps has been no perversion more ob- 
structive of true moral development than this substitution of a 
reference to the glory of God for the direct promptings of the 
sympathetic feelings. Benevolence and justice are strong only 
in proportion as they are directly and inevitably called into 
activity by their proper objects ; pity is strong only because we 
are strongly impressed by suffering ; and only in proportion as 
it is compassion that speaks through the eyes when we soothe, 
and moves the arm when we succor, is a deed strictly benev- 
olent. If the soothing or the succor be given because another 
being wishes or approves it, the deed ceases to be one of 
benevolence, and becomes one of deference, of obedience, of 
self-interest, or vanity. Accessory motives may aid in produc- 
ing an action, but they presuppose the weakness of the direct 
motive ; and conversely, when the direct motive is strong, the 
action of accessory motives will be excluded. If, then, as Dr. 
Cumming inculcates, the glory of God is to be " the absorbing 
and the influential aim" in our thoughts and actions, this must 



96 THE ESSAYS OF 

tend to neutralize the human sympathies ; the stream of feeling 
will be diverted from its natural current in order to feed an 
artificial canal. The idea of God is really moral in its in- 
fluence — it really cherishes all that is best and loveliest in man 
— only when God is contemplated as sympathizing with the 
pure elements of human feeling, as possessing infinitely all 
those attributes which we recognize to be moral in humanity. 
In this light, the idea of God and the sense of His presence 
intensify all noble feeling, and encourage all noble effort, on 
the same principle that human sympathy is found a source of 
strength : the brave man feels braver when he knows that 
another stout heart is beating time with his ; the devoted 
woman who is wearing out her years in patient effort to 
alleviate suffering or save vice from the last stages of degrada- 
tion, finds aid in the pressure of a friendly hand which tells 
her that there is one who understands her deeds, and in her 
place would do the like. The idea of a God who not only 
sympathizes with all we feel and endure for our fellow-men, 
but who will pour new life into our too languid love, and give 
firmness to our vacillating purpose, is an extension and multipli- 
cation of the effects produced by human sympathy ; and it has 
been intensified for the better spirits who have been under the 
influence of orthodox Christianity, by the contemplation of 
Jesus as " God manifest in the flesh." But Dr. Cumming's 
God is the very opposite of all this : he is a God who instead 
of sharing and aiding our human sympathies, is directly in 
collision with them ; who instead of strengthening the bond 
between man and man, by encouraging the sense that they are 
both alike the objects of His love and care, thrusts himself 
between them and forbids them to feel for each other except 
as they have relation to Him. He is a God who, instead of 
adding his solar force to swell the tide of those impulses that 
tend to give humanity a common life in which the good of one 
is the good of all, commands us to check those impulses, lest 
they should prevent us from thinking of His glory. It is in vain 
<or Dr. Gumming to say that we are to love man for God's 



EVANGELICAL TEACHING : DR. CUMMING. 97 

sake : with the conception of God which his teaching presents, 
the love of man for God's sake involves, as his writings abun- 
dantly show, a strong principle of hatred. We can only love 
one being for the sake of another when there is an habitual 
delight in associating the idea of those two beings — that is, 
when the object of our indirect love is a source of joy and honor 
to the object of our direct love ; but according to Dr. Cum- 
ming's theory, the majority of mankind — the majority of his 
neighbors — are in precisely the opposite relation to God. His 
soul has no pleasure in them, they belong more to Satan than 
to Him, and if they contribute to His glory, it is against their 
will. Dr. dimming then can only love some men for God's 
sake ; the rest he must in consistency hate for God's sake. 

There must be many, even in the circle of Dr. Cumming's 
admirers, who would be revolted by the doctrine we have just 
exposed, if their natural good sense and healthy feeling were 
not early stifled by dogmatic beliefs, and their reverence misled 
by pious phrases. But as it is, many a rational question, many 
a generous instinct, is repelled as the suggestion of a supernat- 
ural enemy, or as the ebullition of human pride and corruption. 
This state of inward contradiction can be put an end to only 
by the conviction that the free and diligent exertion of the 
intellect, instead of being a sin, is part of their responsibility — 
that Right and Reason are synonymous. The fundamental 
faith for man is, faith in the result of a brave, honest, and 
steady use of all his faculties : 

" Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell ; 
That mind and soul according well 
May make one music as before, 
But vaster." 

Before taking leave of Dr. Cumming, let us express a hope 
that we have in no case exaggerated the unfavorable character 
of the inferences to be drawn from his pages. His creed often 
obliges him to hope the worst of men, and exert himself in 
proving that the worst is true ; but thus far we are happier 



98 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

than he. We have no theory which requires us to attribute 
unworthy motives to Dr. Cumming, no opinions, religious or 
irreligious, which can make it a gratification to us to detect 
him in delinquencies. On the contrary, the better we are 
able to think of him as a man, while we are obliged to dis- 
approve him as a theologian, the stronger will be the evidence 
for our conviction, that the tendency toward good in human 
nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and 
which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all 
dogmatic perversions. 



IV. 

GERMAN WIT: HENRY HEINE.* 

" Nothing," says Goethe, " is more significant of men's 
character than what they find laughable." The truth of this 
observation would perhaps have been more apparent if he had 
said culture instead of character. The last thing in which the 
cultivated man can have community with the vulgar is their 
jocularity ; and we can hardly exhibit more strikingly the wide 
gulf which separates him from them, than by comparing the 
object which shakes the diaphragm of a coal-heaver with the 
highly complex pleasure derived from a real witticism. That 
any high order of wit is exceedingly complex, and demands a 
ripe and strong mental development, has one evidence in the 
fact that we do not find it in boys at all in proportion to their 
manifestation of other powers. Clever boys generally aspire 
to the heroic and poetic rather than the comic, and the crudest 
of all their efforts are their jokes. Many a witty man will re- 
member how in his school days a practical joke, more or less 
Rabelaisian, was for him the ne plus ultra of the ludicrous. It 
seems to have been the same with the boyhood of the human 
race. The history and literature of the ancient Hebrews gives 
the idea of a people who went about their business and their 
pleasure as gravely as a society of beavers ; the smile and the 
laugh are often mentioned metaphorically, but the smile is one 
of complacency, the laugh is one of scorn. Nor can we 
imagine that the facetious element was very strong in the 

* 1. "Hem-rich Heine's S'ammtliche Werke. " Philadelphia: John 
Weik. 1855. 2. " Vermisehte Schriften von Heinrich Heine." 
Hamburg : Hoffman und Cainpe. 1854. 



100 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

Egyptians ; no laughter lurks in the wondering eyes and the 
broad calm lips of their statues. Still less can the Assyrians 
have had any genius for the comic : the round eyes and sim- 
pering satisfaction of their ideal faces belong to a type which 
is not witty, but the cause of wit in others. The fun of these 
early races was, we fancy, of the after-dinner kind — loud- 
throated laughter over the wine-cup, taken too little account of 
in sober moments to enter as an element into their Art, and 
differing as much from the laughter of a Chamfort or a Sheridan 
as the gastronomic enjoyment of an ancient Briton, whose 
dinner had no other " removes" than from acorns to beech- 
mast and back again to acorns, differed from the subtle pleas- 
ures of the palate experienced by his turtle-eating descendant. 
In fact they had to live seriously through the stages which to 
subsequent races were to become comedy, as those amiable- 
looking preadamite amphibia which Professor Owen has re- 
stored for us in effigy at Sydenham, took perfectly au serieux 
the grotesque physiognomies of their kindred. Heavy experi- 
ence in their case, as in every other, was the base from which 
the salt of future wit was to be made. 

Humor is of earlier growth than Wit, and it is in accordance 
with this earlier growth that it has more affinity with the poetic 
tendencies, while Wit is more nearly allied to the ratiocinative 
intellect. Humor draws its materials from situations and char- 
acteristics ; Wit seizes on unexpected and complex relations. 
Humor is chiefly representative and descriptive ; it is diffuse, 
and flows along without any other law than its own fantastic 
will ; or it flits about like a will- of-the- wisp, amazing us by its 
whimsical transitions. Wit is brief and sudden, and sharply 
defined as a crystal ; it does not make pictures, it is not fan- 
tastic ; but it detects an unsuspected analogy or suggests a 
startling or confounding inference. Every one who has had 
the opportunity of making the comparison will remember that 
the effect produced on him by some witticisms is closely akin to 
the effect produced on him by subtle reasoning which lays open 
a fallacy or absurdity, and there are persons whose delight in 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 101 

such reasoning always manifests itself in laughter. This affin- 
ity of wit with ratiocination is the more obvious in proportion 
as the species of wit is higher and deals less with less words 
and with superficialities than with the essential qualities of 
things. Some of Johnson's most admirable witticisms consist 
in the suggestion of an analogy which immediately exposes 
the absurdity of an action or proposition ; and it is only their 
ingenuity, condensation, and instantaneousness which lift them 
from reasoning into Wit- —they are reasoning raised to a higher 
power. On the other hand, Humor, in its higher forms, and 
in proportion as it associates itself with the sympathetic emo- 
tions, continually passes into poetry : nearly all great modern 
humorists may be called prose poets. 

Some confusion as to the nature of Humor has been created 
by the fact that those who have written most eloquently on it 
have dwelt almost exclusively on its higher forms, and have 
defined humor in general as the sympathetic presentation of 
incongruous elements in human nature and life — a definition 
which only applies to its later development. A great deal of 
humor may coexist with a great deal of barbarism, as we see 
in the Middle Ages ; but the strongest flavor of the humor in 
such cases will come, not from sympathy, but more probably 
from triumphant egoism or intolerance ; at best it will be the 
love of the ludicrous exhibiting itself in illustrations of success- 
ful cunning and of the lex talionis as in Reineke Fuchs, or 
shaking off in a holiday mood the yoke of a too exacting faith, 
as in the old Mysteries. Again, it is impossible to deny a 
high degree of humor to many practical jokes, but no sympa- 
thetic nature can enjoy them. Strange as the genealogy may 
seem, the original parentage of that wonderful and delicious 
mixture of fun, fancy, philosophy, and feeling, which consti- 
tutes modern humor, was probably the cruel mockery of a 
savage at the writhings of a suffering enemy — such is the ten- 
dency of things toward the good and beautiful on this earth ! 
Probably the reason why high culture demands more complete 
harmony with its moral sympathies in humor than in wit, is 



102 



that humor is in its nature more prolix — that it has not the 
direct and irresistible force of wit. Wit is an electric shock, 
which takes us by violence, quite independently of our pre- 
dominant mental disposition ; but humor approaches us more 
deliberately and leaves us masters of ourselves. Hence it is, 
that while coarse and cruel humor has almost disappeared from 
contemporary literature, coarse and cruel wit abounds ; even 
refined men cannot help laughing at a coarse bon mot or a lacer- 
ating personality, if the " shock" of the witticism is a power- 
ful one ; while mere fun will have no power over them if it jar 
on their moral taste. Hence, too, it is, that while wit is per- 
ennial, humor is liable to become superannuated. 

As is usual with definitions and classifications, however, this 
distinction between wit and humor does not exactly represent 
the actual fact. Like all other species, Wit and Humor over- 
lap and blend with each other. There are bon mots, like many 
of Charles Lamb's, which are a sort of facetious hybrids, we 
hardly know whether to call them witty or humorous ; there 
are rather lengthy descriptions or narratives, which, like Vol- 
taire's " Micromegas," would be more humorous if they were 
not so sparkling and antithetic, so pregnant with suggestion 
and satire, that we are obliged to call them witty. We rarely 
find wit untempered by humor, or humor without a spice of 
wit ; and sometimes we find them both united in the highest 
degree in the same mind, as in Shakespeare and Moliere. A 
happy conjunction this, for wit is apt to be cold, and thin- 
lipped, and Mephistophelean in men who have no relish for 
humor, whose lungs do never crow like Chanticleer at fun and 
drollery ; and broad-faced, rollicking humor needs the refining 
influence of wit. Indeed, it may be said that there is no really 
fine writing in which wit has not an implicit, if not an explicit, 
action. The wit may never rise to the surface, it may never 
flame out into a witticism ; but it helps to give brightness and 
transparency, it warns off from flights and exaggerations which 
verge on the ridiculous — in every genre of writing it preserves 
a man from sinking into the genre ennuyeux. And it is emi- 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 103 

nently needed for this office in humorous writing ; for as 
humor has no limits imposed on it by its material, no law but 
its own exuberance, it is apt to become preposterous and weari- 
some unless checked by wit, which is the enemy of all monot- 
ony, of all lengthiness, of all exaggeration. 

Perhaps the nearest approach Nature has given us to a com- 
plete analysis, in which wit is as thoroughly exhausted of 
humor as possible, and humor as bare as possible of wit, is in 
the typical Frenchman and the typical German. Voltaire, the 
intensest example of pure wit, fails in most of his fictions from 
his lack of humor. " Micromegas" is a perfect tale, because, 
as it deals chiefly with philosophic ideas and does not touch the 
marrow of human feeling and life, the writer's wit and wisdom 
were all-sufficient for his purpose. Not so with " Candidc. " 
Here Voltaire had to give pictures of life as well as to convey 
philosophic truth and satire, and here we feel the want of hu- 
mor. The sense of the ludicrous is continually defeated by dis- 
gust, and the scenes, instead of presenting us with an amusing 
or agreeable picture, are only the frame for a witticism. On the 
other hand, German humor generally shows no sense of measure, 
no instinctive tact ; it is either floundering and clumsy as the 
antics of a leviathan, or laborious and interminable as a Lapland 
day, in which one loses all hope that the stars and quiet will 
ever come. For this reason, Jean Paul, the greatest of German 
humorists, is unendurable to many readers, and frequently tire- 
some to all. Here, as elsewhere, the German shows the 
absence of that delicate perception, that sensibility to grada- 
tion, which is the essence of tact and taste, and the necessary 
concomitant of wit. All his subtlety is reserved for the region 
of metaphysics. For Identitcit in the abstract no one can have 
an acuter vision, but in the concrete he is satisfied with a very 
loose approximation. He has the finest nose for Empirismus 
in philosophical doctrine, but the presence of more or less 
tobacco smoke in the air he breathes is imperceptible to him. 
To the typical German — Vetter Michel — it is indifferent 
whether his door-lock will catch, whether his teacup be more 



104 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

or less than an inch thick ; whether or not his book have every 
other leaf unstitched ; whether his neighbor's conversation be 
more or less of a shout ; whether he pronounce b or p, t or d ; 
whether or not his adored one's teeth be few and far between. 
He has the same sort of insensibility to gradations in time. A 
German comedy is like a German sentence : you see no reason 
in its structure why it should ever come to an end, and you ac- 
cept the conclusion as an arrangement of Providence rather 
than of the author. We have heard Germans use the word 
Langeweile, the equivalent for ennui, and we have secretly 
wondered what it can be that produces ennui in a German. 
Not the longest of long tragedies, for "we have known him to 
pronounce that hochst fesselnd (so enchaining !) ; not the 
heaviest of heavy books, for he delights in that as griindlich 
(deep, Sir, deep !) ; not the slowest of journeys in a Post- 
wagen, for the slower the horses, the more cigars he can smoke 
before he reaches his journey's end. German ennui must be 
something as superlative as Barclay's treble X, which, we sup- 
pose, implies an extremely unknown quantity of stupefaction. 

It is easy to see that this national deficiency in nicety of per- 
ception must have its effect on the national appreciation and ex- 
hibition of Humor. You find in Germany ardent admirers of 
Shakespeare, who tell you that what they think most admirable 
in him is his Wortspiel, his verbal quibbles ; and one of these, 
a man of no slight culture and refinement, once cited to a 
friend of ours Proteus's joke in " The Two Gentlemen of 
Verona" — " Nod I? why that's Noddy," as a transcendant 
specimen of Shakespearian wit. German facetiousness is sel- 
dom comic to foreigners, and an Englishman with a swelled 
cheek might take up Kladderadatsch, the German Punch, 
without any danger of agitating his facial muscles. Indeed, 
it is a remarkable fact that, among the five great races con- 
cerned in modern civilization, the German race is the only 
one which, up to the present century, had contributed nothing 
classic to the common stock of European wit and humor ; for 
Beineke Fuchs cannot be regarded as a peculiarly Teutonic 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 105 

product. Italy was the birthplace of Pantomime and the im- 
mortal Pulcinello ; Spain had produced Cervantes ; France had 
produced Rabelais and Moliere, and classic wits innumerable ; 
England had yielded Shakspeare and a host of humorists. But 
Germany had borne no great comic dramatist, no great satirist, 
and she has not yet repaired the omission ; she had not even 
produced any humorist of a high order. Among her great 
writers, Lessing is the one who is the most specifically witty. 
We feel the implicit influence of wit — the " flavor of mind" 
— throughout his writings ; and it is often concentrated into 
pungent satire, as every reader of the Hamburgische Drama- 
turge remembers. Still Lessing' s name has not become Euro- 
pean through his wit, and his charming comedy, Minna von 
Barnhelm, has won no place on a foreign stage. Of course 
we do not pretend to an exhaustive acquaintance with German 
literature ; we not only admit — we are sure that it includes 
much comic writing of which we know nothing. We simply 
state the fact, that no German production of that kind, before 
the present century, ranked as European ; a fact which does 
not, indeed, determine the amount of the national facetious- 
ness, but which is quite decisive as to its quality. Whatever 
may be the stock of fun which Germany yields for home con- 
sumption, she has provided little for the palate of other lands. 
All honor to her for the still greater things she has done for 
us ! She has fought the hardest fight for freedom of thought, 
has produced the grandest inventions, has made magnificent 
contributions to science, has given us some of the divinest 
poetry, and quite the divinest music in the. world. No one 
reveres and treasures the products of the German mind more 
than we do. To say that that mind is not fertile in wit is only 
like saying that excellent wheat land is not rich pasture ; to 
say that we do not enjoy German facetiousness is no more than 
to say that, though the horse is the finest of quadrupeds, we 
do not like him to lay his hoof playfully on our shoulder. 
Still, as we have noticed that the pointless puns and stupid 
jocularity of the boy may ultimately be developed into the epi- 



A)6 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

grammatic brilliancy and polished playfulness of the man ; as 
we believe that racy wit and chastened delicate humor are in- 
evitably the results of invigorated and refined mental activity, 
we can also believe that Germany will, one day, yield a crop of 
wits and humorists. 

Perhaps there is already an earnest of that future crop in the 
existence of Heinrich Heine, a German born with the present 
century, who, to Teutonic imagination, sensibility, and humor, 
adds an amount of esprit that would make him brilliant among 
the most brilliant of Frenchmen. True, this unique German 
wit is half a. Hebrew ; but he and his ancestors spent their 
youth in German air, and were reared on Wurst and Sauer- 
kraut, so that he is as much a German as a pheasant is an Eng- 
lish bird, or a potato an Irish vegetable. Bat whatever else he 
may be, Heine is one of the most remarkable men of this age : 
no echo, but a real voice, and therefore, like all genuine things 
in this world, worth studying ; a surpassing lyric poet, who has 
uttered our feelings for us in delicious song ; a humorist, who 
touches leaden folly with the magic wand of his fancy, and 
transmutes it into the fine gold of art — who sheds his sunny 
smile on human tears, and makes them a beauteous rainbow on 
the cloudy background of life ; a wit, who holds in his mighty 
hand the most scorching lightnings of satire ; an artist in prose 
literature, who has shown even more completely than Goethe 
the possibilities of German prose ; and — in spite of all charges 
against him, true as well as false — a lover of freedom, who has 
spoken wise and brave words on behalf of his fellow-men. He 
is, moreover, a suffering man, who, with all the highly-wrought 
sensibility of genius, has to endure terrible physical ills ; and 
as such he calls forth more than an intellectual interest. It is 
true, alas ! that there is a heavy weight in the other scale — 
that Heine's magnificent powers have often served only to give 
electric force to the expression of debased feeling, so that his 
works are no Phidian statue of gold, and ivory, and gems, but 
have not a little brass, and iron, and miry clay mingled with 
the precious metal. The audacity of his occasional coarseness 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 107 

and personality is unparalleled in contemporary literature, and 
has hardly been exceeded by the license of former days. 
Hence, before his volumes are put within the reach of imma- 
ture minds, there is need of a friendly penknife to exercise a 
strict censorship. Yet, when all coarseness, all scurrility, all 
Mephistophelean contempt for the reverent feelings of other 
men, is removed, there will be a plenteous remainder of ex- 
quisite poetry, of wit, humor, and just thought. It is appar- 
ently too often a congenial task to write severe words about the 
transgressions committed by men of genius, especially when the 
censor has the advantage of being himself a man of no genius, 
so that those transgressions seem to him quite gratuitous ; he y 
forsooth, never lacerated any one by his wit, or gave irresisti- 
ble piquancy to a coarse allusion, and his indignation is not 
mitigated by any knowledge of the temptation that lies in 
transcendent power. We are also apt to measure what a 
gifted man has done by our arbitrary conception of what he 
might have done, rather than by a comparison of his actual 
doings with our own or those of other ordinary men. We 
make ourselves overzealous agents of heaven, and demand 
that our brother should bring usurious interest for his five 
Talents, forgetting that it is less easy to manage five Talents 
than two. Whatever benefit there may be in denouncing the 
evil, it is after all more edifying, and certainly more cheering, 
to appreciate the good. Hence, in endeavoring to give our 
readers some account of Heine and his works, we shall not 
dwell lengthily on his failings ; we shall not hold the candle up 
to dusty, vermin-haunted corners, but let the light fall as much 
as possible on the nobler and more attractive details. Our 
sketch of Heine's life, which has been drawn from various 
sources, will be free from everything like intrusive gossip, and 
will derive its coloring chiefly from the autobiographical hints 
and descriptions scattered through his own writings. Those of 
our readers who happen to know nothing of Heine will in this 
way be making their acquaintance with the writer while they 
are learning the outline of his career. 



108 THE ESSAYS OF 

We have said that Heine was born with the present century; 
but this statement is not precise, for we learn that, according 
to his certificate of baptism, he was born December 12th, 1799. 
However, as he himself says, the important point is that he 
was born, and born on the banks of the Rhine, at Dtisseldorf, 
where his father was a merchant. In his " Reisebilder" he 
gives us some recollections, in his wild poetic way, of the dear 
old town where he spent his childhood, and of his schoolboy 
troubles there. We shall quote from these in butterfly fash- 
ion, sipping a little nectar here and there, without regard to 
any strict order : 

" I first saw the light on the banks of that lovely stream, where Folly 
grows on the green hills, and in autumn is plucked, pressed, poured 
into casks, and sent into foreign lands. Believe me, I yesterday 
heard some one utter folly which, in anno 1811, lay in a bunch of 

grapes I then saw growing on the Johannisberg Mon Dieu ! 

if I had only such faith in me that I could remove mountains, the 
Johannisberg would be the very mountain I should send for wherever 
I might be ; but as my faith is not so strong, imagination must help 

me, and it transports me at once to the lovely Rhine I 

am again a child, and playing with other children on the Schloss- 
platz, at Diisseldorf on the Rhine. Yes, madam, there was I born ; 
and I note this expressly, in case, after my death, seven cities— 
Schilda, Kr'ahwinkel, Polkwitz, Bockum, Dulken, Gottingen, and 
Scho'ppenstadt— should contend for the honor of being my birth- 
place. Diisseldorf is a town on the Rhine ; sixteen thousand men 
live there, and many hundred thousand men besides lie buried 

there Among them, many of whom my mother says, that 

it would be better if they were still living ; for example, my grand- 
father and my uncle, the old Herr von Geldern and the young Herr 
von Geldern, both such celebrated doctors, who saved so many men 
from death, and yet must die themselves. And the pious Ursula, 
who carried me in her arms when I was a child, also lies buried 
there and a rosebush grows on her grave ; she loved the scent of 
roses so well in life, and her heart was pure rose-incense and good- 
ness. The knowing old Canon, too, lies buried there. Heavens, 
what an object he looked when I last saw him ! He was made up of 
nothing but mind and plasters, and nevertheless studied day and night, 
as if he were alarmed lest the worms should find an idea too little in 
his head. And the little William lies there, and for this I am to 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 109 

blame. "We were schoolfellows in the Franciscan monastery, and were 
playing on that side of it where the Diissel flows between stone 
walls, and I said, ' William, fetch out the kitten that has just fallen 
in ' — and merrily he went down on to the plank which lay across the 
brook, snatched the kitten out of the water, but fell in himself, and 
was dragged out dripping and dead. The kitten lived to a good old 

age Princes in that day were not the tormented race as 

they are now ; the crown grew firmly on their heads, and at night 
the} 7- drew a nightcap over it, and slept peacefully, and peacefully 
slept the people at their feet ; and when the people waked in the 
morning, they said, ' Good morning, father ! ' and the princes an- 
swered, ' Good morning, dear children ! ' But it was suddenly quite 
otherwise ; for when we awoke one morning at Diisseldorf, and were 
ready to say, ' Good morning, father ! ' lo ! the father was gone 
away ; and in the whole town there was nothing but dumb sorrow, 
everywhere a sort of funeral disposition ; and people glided along 
silently to the market, and read the long placard placed on the door 
of the Town Hall. It was dismal weather ; yet the lean tailor, Kilian, 
stood in his nankeen jacket which he usually wore only in the house, 
and his blue worsted stockings hung down so that his naked legs 
peeped out mournfully, and his thin lips trembled while he muttered 
the announcement to himself. And an old soldier read rather louder, 
and at many a word a crystal tear trickled down to his brave old 
mustache. I stood near him and wept in company, and asked him, 
* Why we wept?' He answered, ' The Elector has abdicated.' And 
then he read again, and at the words, * for the long-manifested fidel- 
ity of my subjects,' and ' hereby set you free from your allegiance,' 
he wept more than ever. It is strangely touching to see an old man 
like that, with faded uniform and scarred face, weep so bitterly all 
of a sudden. While we were reading, the electoral arms were taken 
down from the Town Hall ; everything had such a desolate air, that 

it was as if an eclipse of the sun were expected I went 

home and wept, and wailed out, ' The Elector has abdicated ! ' In 
vain my mother took a world of trouble to explain the thing to 
me. I knew what I knew ; I was not to be persuaded, but went 
crying to bed, and in the night dreamed that the world was at 
an end." 

The next morning, however, the sun rises as usual, and 
Joachim Murat is proclaimed Grand Duke, whereupon there is 
a holiday at the public school, and Heinrich (or Harry, for 
that was his baptismal name, which he afterward had the 



HO THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

good taste to change), perched on the bronze horse of the Elec- 
toral statue, sees quite a different scene from yesterday's : 

" The next day the world was again all in order, and we had 
school as before, and things were got by heart as before — the Koman 
emperors, chronology, the nouns in im, the verba irregularia, Greek, 
Hebrew, geography, mental arithmetic ! — heavens ! my head is still 
dizzy with it — all must be learned by heart ! And a great deal of this 
came very conveniently for me in after life. For if I had not known 
the Eoman kings by heart, it would subsequently have been quite 
indifferent to me whether Niebuhr had proved or had not proved that 
they never really existed. . . . But oh ! the trouble I had at 
school with the endless dates. And with arithmetic it was still 
worse. What I understood best was subtraction, for that has a very 
practical rule : ' Four can't be taken from three, therefore I must 
borrow one.' But I advise every one in such a case to borrow a few 
extra pence, for no one can tell what may happen. ... As for 
LatiD, you have no idea, madam, what a complicated affair it is. 
The Komans would never have found time to conquer the world if 
they had first had to learn Latin. Luckily for them, they already 
knew in their cradles what nouns have their accusative in im. I, on 
the contrary, had to learn them by heart in the sweat of my brow ; 
nevertheless, it is fortunate for me that I know them . . . and the 
fact that I have them at my finger-ends if I should ever happen to 
want them suddenly, affords me much inward repose and consolation 
in many troubled hours of life. ... Of Greek I will not say a 
word, I should get too much irritated. The monks in the Middle 
Ages were not so far wrong when they maintained that Greek was an 
invention of the devil. God knows the suffering I endured over 
it. . . . With Hebrew it went somewhat better, for I had always 
a great liking for the Jews, though to this very hour they crucify my 
good name ; but I could never get on so far in Hebrew as my watch, 
which had much familiar intercourse with pawnbrokers, and in this 
way contracted many Jewish habits — for example, it wouldn't go on 
Saturdays." 

Heine's parents were apparently not wealthy, but his educa- 
tion was cared for by his uncle, Solomon Heine, a great banker 
in Hamburg, so that he had no early pecuniary disadvantages 
to struggle with. He seems to have been very happy in his 
mother, who was not of Hebrew but of Teutonic blood ; he 
often mentions her with reverence and affection, and in the 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. HI 

" Buch der Lieder" there are two exquisite sonnets addressed 
to her, which tell how his proud spirit was always subdued by 
the charm of her presence, and how her love was the home of 
his heart after restless weary ramblings : 

" Wie machtig auch mem stolzer Muth sich blahe, 
In deiner selig siissen, trauten Nahe 
Ergreift mich oft ein demuthvolles Zagen. 
***** 
Und immer irrte ich nach Liebe, immer 
Nach Liebe, doch die Liebe fand ich nimmer, 
Und kehrte urn nach Hause, krank und triibe. 
Doch da bist du entgegen mir gekommen, 
Und ach ! was da in deinem Aug' geschwommen, 
Das war die siisse, langgesuchte Liebe." 

He was at first destined for a mercantile life, but Nature de- 
clared too strongly against this plan. " God knows," he has 
lately said in conversation with his brother, " I would willingly 
have become a banker, but I could never bring myself to that 
pass. I very early discerned that bankers would one day be 
the rulers of the world." So commerce was at length given up 
for law, the study of which he began in 1819 at the University 
of Bonn. He had already published some poems in the corner 
of a newspaper, and among them was one on Napoleon, the 
object of his youthful enthusiasm. This poem, he says in a 
letter to St. Rene Taillandier, was written when he was only 
sixteen. It is still to be found in the " Buch der Lieder" 
under the title " DieGrenadiere," and it proves that even in its 
earliest efforts his genius showed a strongly specific character. 

It will be easily imagined that the germs of poetry sprouted 
too vigorously in Heine's brain for jurisprudence to find much 
room there. Lectures on history and literature, we are told, 
were more diligently attended than lectures on law. He had 
taken care, too, to furnish his trunk with abundant editions of 
the poets, and the poet he especially studied at that time was 
Byron. At a later period we find his taste taking another 
direction, for he writes, " Of all authors, Byron is precisely 



112 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT. 77 

the one who excites in me the most intolerable emotion ; 
whereas Scott, in every one of his works, gladdens my heart, 
soothes, and invigorates me." Another indication of his bent 
in these Bonn days was a newspaper essay, in which he at- 
tacked the Romantic school ; and here also he went through 
that chicken-pox of authorship — the production of a tragedy. 
Heine's tragedy — Almansor — is, as might be expected, better 
than the majority of these youthful mistakes. The tragic col- 
lision lies in the conflict between natural affection and the 
deadly hatred of religion and of race — in the sacrifice of youth- 
ful lovers to the strife between Moor and Spaniard, Moslem and 
Christian. Some of the situations are striking, and there are 
passages of considerable poetic merit ; but the characters are 
little more than shadowy vehicles for the poetry, and there is 
a want of clearness and probability in the structure. It was 
published two years later, in company with another tragedy, in 
one act, called William Ratcliffe, in which there is rather a 
feeble use of the Scotch second-sight after the manner of the 
Fate in the Greek tragedy. We smile to find Heine saying of 
his tragedies, in a letter to a friend soon after their publica- 
tion : " I know they will be terribly cut up, but I will con- 
fess to you in confidence that they are very good, better than 
my collection of poems, which are not worth a shot." Else- 
where he tells us, that when, after one of Paganini's concerts, 
he was passionately complimenting the great master on his 
violin-playing. Paganini interrupted him thus : " But how 
were you pleased with my howsV 

In 1820 Heine left Bonn for Gottingen. He there pursued 
his omission of law studies, and at the end of three months he 
was rusticated for a breach of the laws against duelling. 
While there, he had attempted a negotiation with Brockhaus 
for the printing of a volume of poems, and had endured the 
first ordeal of lovers and poets — a refusal. It was not until a 
year after that he found a Berlin publisher for his first volume 
of poems, subsequently transformed, with additions, into the 
" Buch der Lieder." He remained between two and three 



GERMAN WIT I HENRY HEINE. 113 

years at Berlin, and the society lie found there seems to have 
made these years an important epoch in his culture. He was 
one of the youngest members of a circle which assembled at the 
house of the poetess Elise von Hohenhausen, the translator of 
Byron — a circle which included Chamisso, Varnhagen, and 
Rahel (Varnhagen 's wife). For Rahel, Heine had a profound 
admiration and regard ; he afterward dedicated to her the 
poems included under the title " Heimkehr ; " and he fre- 
quently refers to her or quotes her in a way that indicates how 
he valued her influence. According to his friend F. von 
Hohenhausen, the opinions concerning Heine's talent were very 
various among his Berlin friends, and it was only a small 
minority that had any presentiment of his future fame. In 
this minority was Elise von Hohenhausen, who proclaimed 
Heine as the Byron of Germany ; but her opinion was met 
with much head-shaking and opposition. We can imagine how 
precious was such a recognition as hers to the young poet, then 
only two or three and twenty, and with by no means an impres- 
sive personality for superficial eyes. Perhaps even the deep- 
sighted were far from detecting in that small, blonde, pale 
young man, with quiet, gentle manners, the latent powers of 
ridicule and sarcasm — the terrible talons that were one day to 
be thrust out from the velvet paw of the young leopard. 

It was apparently during this residence in Berlin that Heine 
united himself with the Lutheran Church. He would will- 
ingly, like many of his friends, he tells us, have remained 
free from all ecclesiastical ties if the authorities there had not 
forbidden residence in Prussia, and especially in Berlin, to 
every one who did not belong to one of the positive religions 
recognized by the State. 

" As Henry IV. once laughingly said, ' Paris vaut Men une messe,' so 
I might with reason say, ' Berlin vaut bien une preche ;' and I could 
afterward, as before, accommodate myself to the very enlightened 
Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had 
in the churches of Berlin, and which was even free from the divinity 
of Christ, like turtle-soup without turtle." 



114 



At the same period, too, Heine became acquainted with 
Hegel. In his lately published " Gestandnisse" (Confessions) 
he throws on Hegel's influence over him the blue light of de- 
moniacal wit, and confounds us by the most bewildering 
double-edged sarcasms ; but that influence seems to have been 
at least more wholesome than the one which produced the 
mocking retractations of the " Gestandnisse." Through all 
his self-satire, we discern that in those days he had something 
like real earnestness and enthusiasm, which are certainly not 
apparent in his present theistic confession of faith. 

" On the whole, I never felt a strong enthusiasm for this philoso- 
phy, and conviction on the subject was out of question. I never was 
an abstract thinker, and I accepted the synthesis of the Hegelian doc- 
trine without demanding any proof, since its consequences flattered 
my vanity. I was young and proud, and it pleased my vainglory 
when I learned from Hegel that the true God was not, as my grand- 
mother believed, the God who lives in heaven, but myself here upon 
earth. This foolish pride had not in the least a pernicious influence 
on my feelings ; on the contrary, it heightened these to the pitch of 
heroism. I was at that time so lavish in generosity and self-sacri- 
fice that I must assuredly have eclipsed the most brilliant deeds of 
those good bourgeois of virtue who acted merely from a sense of duty, 
and simply obeyed the laws of morality." 

His sketch of Hegel is irresistibly amusing ; but we must 
warn the reader that Heine's anecdotes are often mere devices of 
style by which he conveys his satire or opinions. The reader 
will see that he does not neglect an opportunity of giving a sar- 
castic lash or two, in passing, to Meyerbeer, for whose music 
he has a great contempt. The sarcasm conveyed in the substi- 
tution of reputation for music and journalists for musicians, 
might perhaps escape any one unfamiliar with the sly and un- 
expected turns of Heine's ridicule. 

" To speak frankly, I seldom imderstood him, and only arrived at 
the meaning of his words by subsequent reflection. I believe he 
wished not to be understood ; and hence his practice of sprinkling 
his discourse with modifying parentheses ; hence, perhaps, his pref- 
erence for persons of whom he knew that they did not understand 



GERMAN WIT *. HENRY HEINE. 115 

him, and to -whom he all the more willingly granted the honor of his 
familiar acquaintance. Thus every one in Berlin wondered at the 
intimate companionship of the profound Hegel with the late Heinrich 
Beer, a brother of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who is universally known by 
his reputation, and who has been celebrated by the cleverest journal- 
ists. This Beer, namely Heinrich, was a thoroughly stupid fellow, 
and indeed was afterward actually declared imbecile by his family, 
and placed under guardianship, because instead of making a name 
for himself in art or in science by means of his great fortune, he 
squandered his money on childish trifles ; and, for example, one day 
bought six thousand thalers' worth of walking-sticks. This poor 
man, who had no wish to pass either for a great tragic dramatist, or 
for a great star-gazer, or for a laurel-crowned musical genius, a rival 
of Mozart and Eossini, and preferred giving his money for walking- 
sticks— this degenerate Beer enjoyed Hegel's most confidential 
society ; he was the philosopher's bosom friend, his Pylades, and ac- 
companied him everywhere like his shadow. The equally witty and 
gifted Felix Mendelssohn once sought to explain this phenomenon, 
by maintaining that Hegel did not understand Heinrich Beer. I now 
believe, however, that the real ground of that intimacy consisted in 
this — Hegel was convinced that no word of what he said was under- 
stood by Heinrich Beer ; and he could therefore, in his presence, give 
himself up to all the intellectual outpourings of the moment. In 
general, Hegel's conversation was a sort of monologue, sighed forth 
by starts in a noiseless voice ; the odd roughness of his expressions 
often struck me, and many of them have remained in my memory. 
One beautiful starlight evening we stood together at the window, and 
I, a young man of one-and-twenty, having just had a good dinner and 
finished ruy coffee, spoke with enthusiasm of the stars, and called 
them the habitations of the departed. But the master muttered to 
himself, ' The stars ! hum ! hum ! The stars are only a brilliant lep- 
rosy on the face of the heavens.' 'For God's sake,' I cried, 'is 
there, then, no happy place above, where virtue is rewarded after 
death ? ' But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said, cuttingly, 
' So you want a bonus for having taken care of your sick mother, and 
refrained from poisoning your worthy brother ? ' At these words he 
looked anxiously round, but appeared immediately set at rest when 
he observed that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to 
invite him to a game at whist.' ' 

In 1823 Heine returned to Gottingen to complete his career 
as a law- student, and this time he gave evidence of advanced 



116 THE ESSAYS OF 

mental maturity, not only by producing many of the charming 
poems subsequently included in the " Reisebilder," but also by 
prosecuting his professional studies diligently enough to leave 
Gottingen, in 1825, as Doctor juris. Hereupon he settled at 
Hamburg as an advocate, but his profession seems to have been 
the least pressing of his occupations. In those days a small 
blonde young man, with the brim of his hat drawn over his 
nose, his coat flying open, and his hands stuck in his trousers 
pockets, might be seen stumbling along the streets of Ham- 
burg, staring from side to side, and appearing to have small 
regard to the figure he made in the eyes of the good citizens. 
Occasionally an inhabitant more literary than usual would 
point out this young man to his companion as Heinrich Heine ; 
but in general the young poet had not to endure the inconven- 
iences of being a lion. His poems were devoured, but he was 
not asked to devour flattery in return. Whether because the 
fair Hamburgers acted in the spirit of Johnson's advice to 
Hannah More — to * ' consider what her flattery was worth 
before she choked him with it" — or for some other reason, 
Heine, according to the testimony of August Lewald, to 
whom we owe these particulars of his Hamburg life, was left 
free from the persecution of tea-parties. Not, however, from 
another persecution of Genius — nervous headaches, which some 
persons, we are told, regarded as an improbable fiction, in- 
tended as a pretext for raising a delicate white hand to his fore- 
head. It is probable that the sceptical persons alluded to were 
themselves untroubled with nervous headaches, and that their 
hands were not delicate. Slight details, these, but worth telling 
about a man of genius, because they help us to keep in mind 
that he is, after all, our brother, having to endure the petty 
every-day ills of life as we have ; with this difference, that his 
heightened sensibility converts what are mere insect stings for 
us into scorpion stings for him. 

It was, perhaps, in these Hamburg days that Heine paid 
the visit to Goethe, of which he gives us this charming little 
picture : 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 117 

"When I visited him in Weimar, and stood before him, I involun- 
tarily glanced at his side to see whether the eagle was not there with 
the lightning in his beak. I was nearly speaking Greek to him ; 
but, as I observed that he understood German, I stated to him in 
German that the plums on the road between Jena and Weimar were 
very good. I had for so many long winter nights thought over what 
lofty and profound things I would say to Goethe, if ever I saw him. 
And when I saw him at last, I said to him, that the Saxon plums 
were very good ! And Goethe smiled." 

During the next few years Heine produced the most popular 
of all his works — those which have won him his place as the 
greatest of living German poets and humorists. Between 1826 
and 1829 appeared the four volumes of the " Reisebilder" 
(Pictures of Travel) and the " Buch der Lieder" (Book of 
Songs), a volume of lyrics, of which it is hard to say whether 
their greatest charm is the lightness and finish of their style, 
their vivid and original imaginativeness, or their simple, pure 
sensibility. In his " Reisebilder" Heine carries us with him 
to the Hartz, to the isle of Norderney, to his native town 
Diisseldorf, to Italy, and to England, sketching scenery and 
character, now with the wildest, most fantastic humor, now 
with the finest idyllic sensibility — letting his thoughts wander 
from poetry to politics, from criticism to dreamy reverie, and 
blending fun, imagination, reflection, and satire in a sort of 
exquisite, ever-varying shimmer, like the hues of the opal. 

Heine's journey to England did not at all heighten his regard 
for the English. He calls our language the i l hiss of egoism 
(Zischlaute des Egoismus) ; and his ridicule of English awk- 
wardness is as merciless as — English ridicule of German 
awkwardness. His antipathy toward us seems to have grown 
in intensity, like many of his other antipathies ; and in his 
" Vermischte Schriften" he is more bitter than ever. Let us 
quote one of his philippics, since bitters are understood to be 
wholesome : 

" It is certainly a frightful injustice to pronounce sentence of con- 
demnation on an entire people. But with regard to the English, 
momentary disgust might betray me into this injustice ; and on 



118 THE ESSAYS OF 

looking at the mass I easily forget the many brave and noble men 
who distinguished themselves by intellect and love of freedom. But 
these, especially the British poets, were always all the more glaringly 
in contrast with the rest of the nation ; they were isolated martyrs to 
their national relations ; and, besides, great geniuses do not belong 
to the particular land of their birth : they scarcely belong to this 
earth, the Golgotha of their sufferings. The mass— the English 
blockheads, God forgive me ! — are hateful to me in my inmost soul ; 
and I often regard them not at all as my fellow-men, but as miserable 
automata — machines, whose motive power is egoism. In these 
moods, it seems to me as if I heard the whizzing wheelwork by which 
they think, feel, reckon, digest, and pray : their praying, their me- 
chanical Anglican church-going, with the gilt Prayer-book under their 
arms, their stupid, tiresome Sunday, their awkward piety, is most of 
all odious to me. I am firmly convinced that a blaspheming French- 
man is a more pleasing sight for the Divinity than a praying Eng- 
lishman." 

On his return from England Heine was employed at Munich 
in editing the Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen, but in 1830 he 
was again in the north, and the news of the July Revolution 
surprised him on the island of Heligoland. He has given us a 
graphic picture of his democratic enthusiasm in those days in 
some letters, apparently written from Heligoland, which he has 
inserted in his book on Borne. We quote some passages, 
not only for their biographic interest as showing a phase of 
Heine's mental history, but because they are a specimen of his 
power in that kind of dithyrambic writing which, in less 
masterly hands, easily becomes ridiculous : 

" The thick packet of newspapers arrived from the Continent with 
these warm, glowing-hot tidings. They were sunbeams wrapped up 
in packing-paper, and they inflamed my soul till it burst into the 
wildest conflagration. . . . It is all like a dream tome ; especial- 
ly the name Lafayette sounds to me like a legend out of my earli- 
est childhood. Does he really sit again on horseback, commanding 
the National Guard ? I almost fear it may not be true, for it is in 
print. I will myself go to Paris, to be convinced of it with my bod- 
ily eyes. ... It must be splendid, when he rides through the 
street, the citizen of two worlds, the godlike old man, with his sil- 
ver locks streaming down his sacred shoulder. ... He greets, 



GERMAN WIT I HENRY HEINE. 119 

with his dear old eyes, the grandchildren of those who once fought 
with him for freedom and equality. . . . It is now sixty years 
since he returned from America with the Declaration of Human 
Eights, the decalogue of the world's new creed, which was revealed 
to him amid the thunders and lightnings of cannon. . . . And 
the tricolored flag waves again on the towers of Paris, and its streets 
resound with the Marseillaise ! ... It is all over with my yearn- 
ing for repose. I now kn»w again what I will do, what I ought to 
do, what I must do. . . . I am the son of the Ke volution, and seize 
again the hallowed weapons on which my mother pronounced her 
magic benediction. . . . Flowers ! flowers ! I will crown my head 
for the death-fight. And the lyre too, reach me the lyre, that I may 
sing a battle-song. . . . Words like flaming stars, that shoot 
down from the heavens, and burn up the palaces, and illuminate the 
huts. . . . Words like bright javelins, that whirr up to the sev- 
enth heaven and strike the pious hypocrites who have skulked into 
the Holy of Holies. ... I am all joy and song, all sword and 
flame ! Perhaps, too, all delirium. . . . One of those sunbeams 
wrapped in brown paper has flown to my brain, and set my thoughts 
aglow. In vain I dip my head into the sea. No water extinguishes 
this Greek fire. . . . Even the poor Heligolanders shout for joy, 
although they have only a sort of dim instinct of what has occurred. 
The fisherman who yesterday took me over to the little sand island, 
which is the bathing-place here, said to me smilingly, ' The poor peo- 
ple have won ! ' Yes ; instinctively the people comprehend such 
events, perhaps, better than we, with all our means of knowledge. 
Thus Frau von Varnhagen once told me that when the issue of the 
Battle of Leipzig was not yet known, the maid-servant suddenly 
rushed into the room with the sorrowful cry, ' The nobles have 
won ! ' . . . This morning another packet of newspapers is come. 
I devour them like manna. Child that I am, affecting details touch 
me yet more than the momentous whole. Oh, if I could but see the 
dog Medor. . . . The dog Medor brought his master his gun and 
cartridge-box, and when his master fell, and was buried with his fel- 
low-heroes in the Court of the Louvre, there stayed the poor dog like 
a monument of faithfulness, sitting motionless on the grave, day and 
night, eating but little of the food that was offered him — burying the 
greater part of it in the earth, perhaps as nourishment for his buried 
master !" 

The enthusiasm which was kept thus at boiling heat by 
imagination, cooled down rapidly when brought into contact 



120 THE ESSAYS OF 

with reality. In the same book he indicates, in his caustic 
way, the commencement of that change in his political temper- 
ature — for it cannot be called a change in opinion — which has 
drawn down on him immense vituperation from some of the 
patriotic party, but which seems to have resulted simply from 
the essential antagonism between keen wit and fanaticism. 

" On the very first days of my arrival in Paris I observed that 
things wore, in reality, quite different colors from those which had 
been shed on them, when in perspective, by the light of my enthusi- 
asm. The silver locks which I saw fluttering so majestically on the 
shoiilders of Lafayette, the hero of two worlds, were metamorphosed 
into a brown perruque, which made a pitiable covering for a narrow 
skull. And even the dog Medor, which I visited in the Court of the 
Louvre, and which, encamped under tricolored flags and trophies, 
very quietly allowed himself to be fed— he was not at all the right 
dog, but quite an ordinary brute, who assumed to himself merits not 
his own, as often happens with the French ; and, like many others, 
he made a profit out of the glory of the Eevolution. . . . He was 
pampered and patronized, perhaps promoted to the highest posts, 
while the true Medor, some days after the battle, modestly slunk 
out of sight, like the true people who created the Eevolution." 

That it was not merely interest in French politics which sent 
Heine to Paris in 1831, but also a perception that German air 
was not friendly to sympathizers in July revolutions, is humor- 
ously intimated in the " Gestandnisse. " 

" I had done much and suffered much, and when the sun of the July 
Eevolution arose in France, I had become very weary, and needed 
some recreation. Also, my native air was every day more unhealthy 
for me, and it was time I should seriously think of a change of cli- 
mate, I had visions : the clouds terrified me, and made all sorts of 
ugly faces at me. It often seemed to me as if the sun were a Prus, 
sian cockade ; at night I dreamed of a hideous black eagle, which 
gnawed my liver ; and I was very melancholy. Add to this, I had 
become acquainted with an old Berlin Justizrath, who had spent 
many years in the fortress of Spandau, and he related to me how un- 
pleasant it is when one is obliged to wear irons in winter. For my- 
self I thought it very unchristian that the irons were not warmed a 
trifle. If the irons were warmed a little for us they would not make 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 121 

so unpleasant an impression, and even chilly natures might then 
bear them very well ; it would be only proper consideration, too, if 
the fetters were perfumed with essence of roses and laurels, as is the 
case in this country (France). I asked my Justizrath whether he 
often got oysters to eat at Spandau ? He said, No ; Spandau was too 
far from the sea. Moreover, he said meat was very scarce there, and 
there was no kind of volaille except flies, which fell into one's 
soup. . . . Now, as I really needed some recreation, and as 
Spandau is too far from the sea for oysters to be got there, and the 
Spandau fly-soup did not seem very appetizing to me, as, besides all 
this, the Prussian chains are very cold in winter, and could not be 
conducive to my health, I resolved to visit Paris." 

Since this time Paris has been Heine's home, and his best 
prose works have been written either to inform the Germans on 
French affairs or to inform the French on German philosophy 
and literature. He became a correspondent of the Allgemeine 
Zeitung, and his correspondence, which extends, with an 
interruption of several years, from 1831 to 1844, forms the 
volume entitled " Franzosische Zustande" (French Affairs), 
and the second and third volume of his " Yermischte 
Schriften." It is a witty and often wise commentary on 
public men and public events : Louis Philippe, Casimir Perier, 
Thiers, Guizot, Rothschild, the Catholic party, the Socialist 
party, have their turn of satire and appreciation, for Heine 
deals out both with an impartiality which made his less favor- 
able critics — Borne, for example — charge him with the rather 
incompatible sins of reckless caprice and venality. Literature 
and art alternate with politics : we have now a sketch of 
George Sand or a description of one of Horace Vernet's 
pictures ; now a criticism of Victor Hugo or of Liszt ; now an 
irresistible caricature of Spontini or Kalkbrenner ; and occa- 
sionally the predominant satire is relieved by a fine saying or a 
genial word of admiration. And all is done with that airy 
lightness, yet precision of touch, which distinguishes Heine 
beyond any living writer. The charge of venality was loudly 
made against Heine in Germany : first, it was said that he was 
paid to write ; then, that he was paid to abstain from writing ; 



122 THE ESSAYS OF 

and the accusations were supposed to have an irrefragable basis 
in the fact that he accepted a stipend from the French govern- 
ment. He has never attempted to conceal the reception of 
that stipend, and we think his statement (in the " Vermischte 
Sohriften") of the circumstances under which it was offered 
and received, is a sufficient vindication of himself and M. Guizot 
from any dishonor in the matter. 

It may be readily imagined that Heine, with so large a share 
of the Gallic element as he has in his composition, was soon at 
his ease in Parisian society, and the years here were bright with 
intellectual activity and social enjoyment. " His wit," wrote 
August Lewald, " is a perpetual gushing fountain ; he throws 
off the most delicious descriptions with amazing facility, and 
sketches the most comic characters in conversations." Such a 
man could not be neglected in Paris, and Heine was sought on 
all sides — as a guest in distinguished salons, as a possible 
proselyte in the circle of the Saint Simonians. His literary 
productiveness seems to have been furthered by his congenial 
life, which, however, was soon to some extent embittered by 
the sense of exile ; for since 1835 both his works and his 
person have been the object of denunciation by the German 
governments. Between 1833 and 1845 appeared the four 
volumes of the " Salon," " Die Romantische Schule" (both 
written, in the first instance, in French), the book on Borne, 
" Atta Troll," a romantic poem, " Deutschland," an ex- 
quisitely humorous poem, describing his last visit to Germany, 
and containing some grand passages of serious writing ; and 
the " Neue Gedichte," a collection of lyrical poems. Among 
the most interesting of his prose works are the second volume 
of the " Salon," which contains a survey of religion and 
philosophy in Germany, and the " Romantische Schule," a 
delightful introduction to that phase of German literature 
known as the Romantic school. The book on Borne, which 
appeared in 1840, two years after the death of that writer, 
excited great indignation in Germany, as a wreaking of 
vengeance on the dead, an insult to the memory of a man who 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 123 

had worked and suffered in the cause of freedom — a cause 
which was Heine's own. Borne, we may observe paren- 
thetically for the information of those who are not familiar 
with recent German literature, was a remarkable political writer 
of the ultra-liberal party in Germany, who resided in Paris at 
the same time with Heine : a man of stern, uncompromising 
partisanship and bitter humor. Without justifying Heine's 
production of this book, we see excuses for him which should 
temper the condemnation passed on it. There was a radical 
opposition of nature between him and Borne ; to use his own 
distinction, Heine is a Hellene — sensuous, realistic, exquisitely 
alive to the beautiful ; while Borne was a Nazarene — ascetic, 
spiritualistic, despising the pure artist as destitute of earnest- 
ness. Heine has too keen a perception of practical absurdities 
and damaging exaggerations ever to become a thoroughgoing 
partisan ; and with a love of freedom, a faith in the ultimate 
triumph of democratic principles, of which we see no just 
reason to doubt the genuineness and consistency, he has been 
unable to satisfy more zealous and one-sided liberals by giving 
his adhesion to their views and measures, or by adopting a 
denunciatory tone against those in the opposite ranks. Borne 
could not forgive what he regarded as Heine's epicurean 
indifference and artistic dalliance, and he at length gave vent 
to his antipathy in savage attacks on him through the press, 
accusing him of utterly lacking character and principle, and 
even of writing under the influence of venal motives. To these 
attacks Heine remained absolutely mute — from contempt ac- 
cording to his own account ; but the retort, which he res- 
olutely refrained from making during Borne's life, comes in 
this volume published after his death with the concentrated 
force of long-gathering thunder. The utterly inexcusable part 
of the book is the caricature of Borne's friend, Madame Wohl, 
and the scurrilous insinuations concerning Borne's domestic 
life. It is said, we know not with how much truth, that Heine 
had to answer for these in a duel with Madame Wohl's hus- 
band, and that, after receiving a serious wound, he promised 



124 THE ES8AYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

to withdraw the offensive matter from a future edition. That 
edition, however, has not been called for. Whatever else we 
may think of the book, it is impossible to deny its transcen- 
dent talent — the dramatic vigor with which Borne is made 
present to us, the critical acumen with which he is character- 
ized, and the wonderful play of wit, pathos, and thought which 
runs through the whole. But we will let Heine speak for him- 
self, and first we will give part of his graphic description of the 
way in which Borne' s mind and manners grated on his taste : 

" To the disgust which, in intercourse with Borne, I was in clanger 
of feeling toward those who surrounded him, was added the annoy- 
ance I felt from his perpetual talk about politics. Nothing but po- 
litical argument, and again political argument, even at table, where 
he managed to hunt me out. At dinner, when I so gladly forget all 
the vexations of the world, he spoiled the best dishes for me by his 
patriotic gall, which he poured as a bitter sauce over everything. 
Calf's feet, d la maitre dliotel, then my innocent bonne bouche, he com- 
pletely spoiled for me by Job's tidings from Germany, which he 
scraped together out of the most unreliable newspapers. And then 
his accursed remarks, which spoiled one's appetite ! . . . This 
was a sort of table-talk which did not greatly exhilarate me, and I 
avenged myself by affecting an excessive, almost impassioned in- 
difference for the object of Borne's enthusiasm. For example, Borne 
was indignant that immediately on my arrival in Paris I had nothing 
better to do than to write for German papers a long account of the 
Exhibition of Pictures. I omit all discussion as to whether that inter- 
est in Art which induced me to undertake this work was so utterly irre- 
concilable with the revolutionary interests of the day ; but Borne saw 
in it a proof of my indifference toward the sacred cause of humanity, 
and I could in my turn spoil the taste of his patriotic sauerkraut for 
him by talking all dinner-time of nothing but pictures, of Kobert's 
* Eeapers, ' Horace Vernet's ' Judith, ' and Scheffer's ' Faust.' . . . 
That I never thought it worth while to discuss my political princi- 
ples with him it is needless to say ; and once when he declared that 
he had found a contradiction in my writings, I satisfied myself with 
the ironical answer, ' You are mistaken, mon cher ; such contradic- 
tions never occur in my works, for always before I begin to write, I 
read over the statement of my political principles in my previous 
writings, that I may not contradict myself, and that no one may be 
able to reproach me with apostasy from my liberal principles.' " 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 125 

And here is his own account of the spirit in which the book 
was written : 

° I was never Borne' s friend, nor was I ever his enemy. The dis- 
pleasure which he could often excite in me was never very impor- 
tant, and he atoned for it sufficiently by the cold silence which I op- 
posed to all his accusations and raillery. While he lived I wrote not 
a line against him, I never thought about him, I ignored him com- 
pletely ; and that enraged him beyond measure. If I now speak of 
him, I do so neither out of enthusiasm nor out of uneasiness ; I am 
conscious of the coolest impartiality. I write here neither an apology 
nor a critique, and as in painting the man I go on my own observa- 
tion, the image I present of him ought perhaps to be regarded as a 
real portrait. And such a monument is due to him — to the great 
wrestler who, in the arena of our political games, wrestled so cour- 
ageously, and earned, if not the laurel, certainly the crown of oak 
leaves. I give an image with his true features, without idealization — 
the more like him the more honorable for his memory. He was 
neither a genius nor a hero ; he was no Olympian god. He was a 
man, a denizen of this earth ; he was a good writer and a great 
patriot. . . . Beautiful, delicious peace, which I feel at this mo- 
ment in the depths of my soul ! Thou rewardest me sufficiently for 
everything I have done and for everything I have despised. . . . 
I shall defend myself neither from the reproach of indifference nor 
from the suspicion of venality. I have for years, during the life of 
the insinuator, held such self -justification unworthy of me ; now even 
decency demands silence. That would be a frightful spectacle ! — po- 
lemics between Death and Exile ! Dost thou stretch out to me a be- 
seeching hand from the grave ? Without rancor I reach mine toward 
thee. . . . See how noble it is and pure ! It was never soiled 
by pressing the hands of the mob, any more than by the impure gold 
of the people's enemy. In reality thou hast never injured me. . . . 
In all thy insinuations there is not a louis dors worth of truth." 

In one of these years Heine was married, and, in deference 
to the sentiments of his wife, married according to the rites 
of the Catholic Church. On this fact busy rumor afterward 
founded the story of his conversion to Catholicism, and could 
of course name the day and spot on which he abjured Prot- 
estanism. In his " Gestandnisse" Heine publishes a denial of 
this rumor ; less, he says, for the sake of depriving the Cath- 



126 THE ESSAYS OF 

olics of the solace they may derive from their belief in a new 
convert, than in order to cut off from another party the more 
spiteful satisfaction of bewailing his instability : 

" That statement of time and place was entirely correct. I was 
actually on the specified day in the specified church, which was, 
moreover, a Jesuit church, namely, St. Sulpice ; and I then went 
through a religious act. But this act was no odious abjuration, but 
a very innocent conjugation ; that is to say, my marriage, already 
performed, according to the civil law there received the ecclesias- 
tical consecration, because my wife, whose family are staunch Cath- 
olics, would not have thought her marriage sacred enough without 
such a ceremony. And I would on no account cause this beloved 
being any uneasiness or disturbance in her religious views.' ' 

For sixteen years — from 1831 to 1847 — Heine lived that 
rapid concentrated life which is known only in Paris ; but 
then, alas ! stole on the " days of darkness," and they were 
to be many. In 1847 he felt the approach of the terrible 
spinal disease which has for seven years chained him to his 
bed in acute suffering. The last time he went out of doors, 
he tells us, was in May, 1848 : 

" With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and I almost sank 
down as I entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed god- 
dess of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. 
At her feet I lay long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have 
pitied me. The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the 
same time disconsolately, as if she would say, Dost thou not see, 
then, that I have no arms, and thus cannot help thee ?" 

Since 1848, then, this poet, whom the lovely objects of Nat- 
ure have always " haunted like a passion," has not descended 
from the second story of a Parisian house ; this man of hungry 
intellect has been shut out from all direct observation of life, 
all contact with society, except such as is derived from visitors 
to his sick-room. The terrible nervous disease, has affected his 
eyes ; the sight of one is utterly gone, and he can only raise 
the lid of the other by lifting it with his finger. Opium alone 
is the beneficent genius that stills his pain. We hardly know 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 127 

■whether to call it an alleviation or an intensification of the 
torture that Heine retains his mental vigor, his poetic imagina- 
tion, and his incisive wit ; for if this intellectual activity fills 
up a blank, it widens the sphere of suffering. His brother 
described him in 1851 as still, in moments when the hand of 
pain was not too heavy on him, the same Heinrich Heine, poet 
and satirist by turns. In such moments he would narrate the 
strangest things in the gravest manner. But when he came to 
an end, he would roguishly lift up the lid of his right eye with 
his finger to see the impression he had produced ; and if his 
audience had been listening with a serious face, he would break 
into Homeric laughter. We have other proof than personal 
testimony that Heine's disease allows his genius to retain much 
of its energy, in the " Romanzero," a volume of poems pub- 
lished in 1851, and written chiefly during the three first years 
of his illness ; and in the first volume of the " Vermischte 
Schriften," also the product of recent years. Yery plaintive is 
the poet's own description of his condition, in the epilogue to 
the " Romanzero :" 

" Do I really exist ? My body is so shrunken that I am hardly 
anything but a voice ; and my bed reminds me of the singing grave 
of the magician Merlin, which lies in the forest of Brozeliand, in 
Brittany, under tall oaks whose tops soar like green flames toward 
heaven. Alas ! I envy thee those trees and the fresh breeze that 
moves their branches, brother Merlin, for no. green leaf rustles about 
my mattress-grave in Paris, where early and late I hear nothing but 
the rolling of vehicles, hammering, quarrelling, and piano-strum- 
ming. A grave without repose, death without the privileges of the 
dead, who have no debts to pay, and need write neither letters nor 
books— that is a piteous condition. Long ago the measure has been 
taken for my coffin and for my necrology, but I die so slowly that 
the process is tedious for me as well as my friends. But patience : 
everything has an end. You will one day find the booth closed where 
the puppet-show of my humor has so often delighted you." 

As early as 1850 it was rumored that since Heine's illness 
a change had taken place in his religious views ; and as rumor 
seldom stops short of extremes, it was soon said that he had 



128 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

become a thorough pietist, Catholics and Protestants by turns 
claiming him as a convert. Such a change in so uncom- 
promising an iconoclast, in a man who had been so zealous in 
his negations as Heine, naturally excited considerable sensation 
in the camp he was supposed to have quitted, as well as in 
that he was supposed to have joined. In the second volume of 
the " Salon," and in the " Romantische Schule," written in 
1834 and '35, the doctrine of Pantheism is dwelt on with a 
fervor and unmixed seriousness which show that Pantheism 
was then an animating faith to Heine, and he attacks what he 
considers the false spiritualism and asceticism of Christianity 
as the enemy of true beauty in Art, and of social well-being. 
Now, however, is was said that Heine had recanted all his 
heresies ; but from the fact that . visitors to his sick-room 
brought away very various impressions as to his actual religious 
views, it seemed probable that his love of mystification had 
found a tempting opportunity for exercise on this subject, and 
that, as one of his friends said, he was not inclined to pour out 
unmixed wine to those who asked for a sample out of mere 
curiosity. At length, in the epilogue to the " Roinanzero," 
dated 1851, there appeared, amid much mystifying banter, a 
declaration that he had embraced Theism and the belief in a 
future life, and what chiefly lent an air of seriousness and 
reliability to this affirmation was the fact that he took care to 
accompany it with certain negations : 

" As concerns myself, I can boast of no particular progress in pol- 
itics ; I adhered (after 1848) to the same democratic princijjles which 
had the homage of my youth, and for which I have ever since glowed 
with increasing fervor. In theology, on the contrary, I must accuse 
myself of retrogression, since, as I have already confessed, I returned 
to the old superstition — to a personal God. This fact is, once for all, 
not to be stifled, as many enlightened and well-meaning friends 
would fain have had it. But I must expressly contradict the report 
that my retrograde movement has carried me as far as to the thresh- 
old of a Church, and that I have even been received into her lap. 
No : my religious convictions and views have remained free from any 
tincture of ecclesiasticism ; no chiming of bells has allured me, no 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 129 

altar candles have dazzled rue. I have dallied with no dogmas, and 
have not utterly renounced my reason. " 

This sounds like a serious statement. But what shall we say 
to a convert w r ho plays with his newly-acquired belief in a 
future life, as Heine does in the very next page ? He says to 
his reader : 

" Console thyself ; we shall meet again in a better world, where I 
also mean to write thee better books. I take for granted that my 
health will there be improved, and that Swedenborg has not deceived 
me. He relates, namely, with great confidence, that we shall peace- 
fully carry on our old occupations in the other world, just as we have 
done in this ; that we shall there preserve our individuality unaltered, 
and that death will produce no particular change in our organic de- 
velopment. t Swedenborg is a thoroughly honorable fellow, and quite 
worthy of credit in what he tells us about the other world, where he 
saw with his own eyes the persons who had played a great part on 
our earth. Most of them, he says, remained unchanged, and busied 
themselves with the same things as formerly ; they remained station- 
ary, were old-fashioned, rococo— which now and then produced a 
ludicrous effect. For example, our dear Dr. Martin Luther kept fast 
by his doctrine of Grace, about which he had for three hundred years 
daily written down the same mouldy arguments— just in the same 
way as the late Baron Ekstein, who during twenty years printed in 
the Allgemeine Zeitung one and the same article, perpetually chewing 
over again the old cud of Jesuitical doctrine. But, as we have said, 
all persons who once figured here below were not found by Sweden- 
borg in such a state of fossil immutability : many had considerably 
developed their character, both for good and evil, in the other world ; 
and this gave rise to some singular results. Some who had been heroes 
and saints on earth had there sunk into scamps and good-for-nothings ; 
and there were examples, too, of a contrary transformation. For in- 
stance, the fumes of self-conceit mounted to Saint Anthony's head 
when he learned what immense veneration and adoration had been 
paid to him by all Christendom ; and he who here below withstood 
the most terrible temptations was now quite an impertinent rascal 
and dissolute gallows-bird, who vied with his pig in rolling himself 
in the mud. The chaste Susanna, from having been excessively vain 
of her virtue, which she thought indomitable, came to a shameful 
fall, and she who once so gloriously resisted the two old men, was a 
victim to the seductions of the young Absalom, the son of David. 
On the contrary, Lot's daughters had in the lapse of time become 



130 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

very virtuous, and passed in the other world for models of propriety : 
the old man, alas ! had stuck to the wine-flask." 

In his " Gestandnisse," the retractation of former opinions 
and profession of Theism are renewed, but in a strain of irony 
that repels our sympathy and baffles our psychology. Yet 
what strange, deep pathos is mingled with the audacity of the 
following passage ! 

" What avails it me, that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown 
my marble bust with laurel, when the withered hands of an aged 
nurse are pressing Spanish flies behind my ears ? What avails it me, 
that all the roses of Shiraz glow and waft incense for me ? Alas ! 
Shiraz is two thousand miles from the Kue d 'Amsterdam, where, in 
the wearisome loneliness of my sick-room, I get no scent, except it 
be, perhaps, the perfume of warmed towels. Alas ! God's satire 
weighs heavily on me. The great Author of the universe, the Aris- 
tophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, 
to me, the little, earthly, German Aristophanes, how my wittiest 
saroasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, 
and how miserably I am beneath him in humor, in colossal 
mockery." 

For our own part, we regard the paradoxical irreverence with 
which Heine professes his theoretical reverence as pathological, 
as the diseased exhibition of a predominant tendency urged 
into anomalous action by the pressure of pain and mental 
privation — as a delirium of wit starved of its proper nourish- 
ment. It is not for us to condemn, who have never had the 
same burden laid on us ; it is not for pigmies at their ease to 
criticise the writhings of the Titan chained to the rock. 

On one other point we must touch before quitting Heine's 
personal history. There is a standing accusation against him 
in some quarters of wanting political principle, of wishing to 
denationalize himself, and of indulging in insults against his 
native country. Whatever ground may exist for these accusa- 
tions, that ground is not, so far as we see, to be found in his 
writings. He may not have much faith in German revolutions 
and revolutionists ; experience, in his case as in that of others, 
may have thrown his millennial anticipations into more distant 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 131 

perspective ; but we see no evidence that he has ever swerved 
from his attachment to the principles of freedom, or written 
anything which to a philosophic mind is incompatible with 
true patriotism. He has expressly denied the report that he 
wished to become naturalized in France ; and his yearning 
toward his native land and the accents of his native language is 
expressed with a pathos the more reliable from the fact that he 
is sparing in such effusions. We do not see why Heine's 
satire of the blunders and foibles of his fellow-countrymen 
should be denounced as a crime of l&se-patrie, any more than 
the political caricatures of any other satirist. The real offences 
of Heine are his occasional coarseness and his unscrupulous 
personalities, which are reprehensible, not because they are 
directed against his fellow-countrymen, but because they are 
personalities. That these offences have their precedents in men 
whose memory the world delights to honor does not remove 
their turpitude, but it is a fact which should modify our con- 
demnation in a particular case ; unless, indeed, we are to 
deliver our judgments on a principle of compensation — making 
up for our indulgence in one direction by our severity in 
another. On this ground of coarseness and personality, a true 
bill may be found against Heine ; not, we think, on the 
ground that he has laughed at what is laughable in his com- 
patriots. Here is a specimen of the satire under which we 
suppose German patriots wince : 

" Khenish Bavaria was to be the starting-point of the German rev- 
olution. Zweibriicken was the Bethlehem in which the infant Sav- 
iour — Freedom — lay in the cradle, and gave whimpering promise of 
redeeming the world. Near his cradle bellowed many an ox, who 
afterward, when his horns were reckoned on, showed himself a very 
harmless brute. It was confidently believed that the German revolu- 
tion would begin in Zweibriicken, and everything was there ripe for 
an outbreak. But, as has been hinted, the tender-heartedness of 
some persons frustrated that illegal undertaking. For example, 
among the Bipontine conspirators there was a tremendous braggart, 
who was always loudest in his rage, who boiled over with the hatred 
of tyranny, and this man was fixed on to strike the first blow, by 



132 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

cutting down a sentinel who kept an important post ■ What ! ' 

cried the man, when this order was given him — ' What ! — me ! Can 
you expect so horrible, so bloodthirsty an act of me ? I — 7, kill an 
innocent sentinel ? I, who am the father of a family ! And this sen- 
tinel is perhaps also father of a family. One father of a family kill 
another father of a family ? Yes. Kill — murder ! ' " 

In political matters Heine, like all men whose intellect and 
taste predominate too far over their impulses to allow of their 
becoming partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat and the 
democrat. By the one he is denounced as a man who holds 
incendiary principles, by the other as a half-hearted " trim- 
mer." He has no sympathy, as he says, with " that vague, 
barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm, which 
plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of generali- 
ties, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, 
who had so fervent an enthusiasm for General Jackson, that he 
at last sprang from the top of a mast into the sea, crying, 
" I die for General Jackson /" 

1 ' But thou liest, Brutus, thou liest, Cassius, and thou, too, liest, 
Asinius, in maintaining that my ridicule attacks those ideas which are 
the precious acquisition of Humanity, and for which I myself have 
so striven and suffered. No ! for the very reason that those ideas 
constantly hover before the poet in glorious splendor and majesty, 
he is the more irresistibly overcome by laughter when he sees how 
rudely, awkwardly, and clumsily those ideas are seized and mirrored 
in the contracted minds of contemporaries. . . . There are mir- 
rors which have so rough a surface that even an Apollo reflected in 
them becomes a caricature, and excites our laughter. But we laugh 
then only at the caricature, not at the god." 

For the rest, why should we demand of Heine that he should 
be a hero, a patriot, a solemn prophet, any more than we 
should demand of a gazelle that it should draw well in harness ? 
Nature has not made him of her sterner stuff — not of iron and 
adamant, but of pollen of flowers, the juice of the grape, and 
Puck's mischievous brain, plenteously mixing also the dews of 
kindly affection and the gold-dust of noble thoughts. It is, 
after all, a tribute which his enemies pay him when they utter 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 133 

their bitterest dictum, namely, that he is " nur Dichter" — only 
a poet. Let us accept this point of view for the present, and, 
leaving all consideration of him as a man, look at him simply 
as a poet and literary artist. 

Heine is essentially a lyric poet. The finest products of his 

genius are 

" Short swallow flights of song that dip 
Their wings in tears, and skim away ;" 

and they are so emphatically songs that, in reading them, we 
feel as if each must have a twin melody born in the same 
moment and by the same inspiration. Heine is too impressible 
and mercurial for any sustained production ; even in his short 
lyrics his tears sometimes pass into laughter and his laughter 
into tears ; and his longer poems, " Atta Troll" and " Deutsch- 
land," are full of Ariosto-like transitions. His song has a 
wide compass of notes ; he can take us to the shores of the 
Northern Sea and thrill us by the sombre sublimity of his pict- 
ures and dreamy fancies ; he can draw forth our tears by the 
voice he gives to our own sorrows, or to the sorrows of " Poor 
Peter ;" he can throw a cold shudder over us by a mysterious 
legend, a ghost story, or a still more ghastly rendering of hard 
reality ; he can charm us by a quiet idyl, shake us with laugh- 
ter at his overflowing fun, or give us a piquant sensation of sur- 
prise by the ingenuity of his transitions from the lofty to the 
ludicrous. This last power is not, indeed, essentially poetical ; 
but only a poet can use it with the same success as Heine, for 
only a poet can poise our emotion and expectation at such a 
height as to give effect to the sudden fall. Heine's greatest 
power as a poet lies in his simple pathos, in the ever-varied but 
always natural expression he has given to the tender emotions. 
We may perhaps indicate this phase of his genius by referring 
to AVordsworth's beautiful little poem, " She dwelt among the 
untrodden ways ;" the conclusion — 

" She dwelt alone, and few could know 
When Lucy ceased to be ; 
But she is in her grave, and, oh ! 
The difference to me" — 



134 THE ESSAYS OE " GEORGE ELIOT." 

is entirely in Heine's manner ; and so is Tennyson's poem of a 
dozen lines, call "Circumstance." Both these poems have 
Heine's pregnant simplicity. But, lest this comparison should 
mislead, we must say that there is no general resemblance 
between either Wordsworth, or Tennyson, and Heine. Their 
greatest qualities lie quite a way from the light, delicate lucid- 
ity, the easy, rippling music, of Heine's style. The distinctive 
charm of his lyrics may best be seen by comparing them with 
Goethe's. Both have the same masterly, finished simplicity 
and rhythmic grace ; but there is more thought mingled with 
Goethe's feeling — his lyrical genius is a vessel that draws more 
water than Heine's, and, though it seems to glide along with 
equal ease, we have a sense of greater weight and force, accom- 
panying the grace of its movements. 

But for this very reason Heine touches our hearts more 
strongly ; his songs are all music and feeling — they are like 
birds that not only enchant us with their delicious notes, but 
nestle against us with their soft breasts, and make us feel the 
agitated beating of their hearts. He indicates a whole sad his- 
tory in a single quatrain ; there is not an image in it, not a 
thought; but it is beautiful, simple, and perfect as a "big 
round tear' ' — it is pure feeling, breathed in pure music : 

"Anfangs wolJt' ich fastverzagen 
Und ich glaubt' ich trug es nie, 
Und ich hab' es doch getragen — 
Aber fragt mich nur nicht, wie." *" 

He excels equally in the more imaginative expression of feel- 
ing : he represents it by a brief image, like a finely cut cameo ; 
he expands it into a mysterious dream, or dramatizes it in a 
little story, half ballad, half idyl ; and in all these forms his art 
is so perfect that we never have a sense of artificiality or of 
unsuccessful effort ; but all seems to have developed itself by 
the same beautiful necessity that brings forth vine-leaves and 

* At first I was almost in despair, and I thought I could never 
bear it, and yet I have borne it— only do not ask me how ? 



GERMAN" WIT : HENRY HEINE. 135 

grapes and the natural curls of childhood. Of Heine's humor- 
ous poetry, " Deutschland " is the most charming specimen — 
charming, especially, because its wit and humor grow out of a 
rich loam of thought. " Atta Troll" is more original, more 
various, more fantastic ; but it is too great a strain on the im- 
agination to be a general favorite. We have said that feeling 
is the element in which Heine's poetic genius habitually floats ; 
but he can occasionally soar to a higher region, and impart deep 
significance to picturesque symbolism ; he can flash a sublime 
thought over the past and into the future ; he can pour forth a 
lofty strain of hope or indignation. Few could forget, after 
once hearing them, the stanzas at the close of " Deutschland," 
in which he warns the King of Prussia not to incur the irredeem- 
able hell which the injured poet can create for him — the singing 
flames of a Dante's terza rima ! 

" Kennst cm die Holle des Dante nicht, 
Die schrecklichen Terzetten ? 
Wen da der Dichter hineingesperrt 
Den kann kein Gott mehr retten. 

"Kein Gott, kein Heiland, erlost ihn ja 
Aus diesen singenden Flammen ! 
Nimni dich in Acht, das wir dich nicht 
Zu solcker Holle verdammen." * 

As a prosaist, Heine is, in one point of view, even more distin- 
guished than as a poet. The German language easily lends 
itself to all the purposes of poetry ; like the ladies of the Mid- 
dle Ages, it is gracious and compliant to the Troubadours. 
But as these same ladies were often crusty and repulsive to their 

* It is not fair to the English reader to indulge in German quota- 
tions, but in our opinion poetical translations are usually worse than 
valueless. For those who think differently, however, we may men- 
tion that Mr. Stores Smith has published a modest little book, con- 
taining " Selections from the Poetry of Heinrich Heine," and that a 
meritorious (American) translation of Heine's complete works, by 
Charles Leland, is now appearing in shilling numbers. 



136 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT.'' 

unmusical mates, so the German language generally appears awk- 
ward and unmanageable in the hands of prose writers. Indeed, 
the number of really fine German prosaists before Heine would 
hardly have exceeded the numerating powers of a New Hol- 
lander, who can count three and no more. Persons the most 
familiar with German prose testify that there is an extra fatigue 
in reading it, just as we feel an extra fatigue from our walk 
when it takes us over ploughed clay. But in Heine's hands 
German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull, becomes, 
like clay in the hands of the chemist, compact, metallic, brill- 
iant ; it is German in an allotropic condition. No dreary laby- 
rinthine sentences in which you find " no end in wandering- 
mazes lost ;" no chains of adjectives in linked harshness long 
drawn out ; no digressions thrown in as parentheses ; but 
crystalline definiteness and clearness, fine and varied rhythm, 
and all that delicate precision, all those felicities of word and 
cadence, which belong to the highest order of prose. And 
Heine has proved — what Madame de Stael seems to have 
doubted — that it is possible to be witty in German ; indeed, 
in reading hirn, you might imagine that German was pre-emi- 
nently the language of wit, so flexible, so subtle, so piquant 
does it become under his management. He is far more an 
artist in prose than Goethe. He has not the breadth and re- 
pose, and the calm development which belong to Goethe's 
style, for they are foreign to his mental character ; but he excels 
Goethe in susceptibility to the manifold qualities of prose, and 
in mastery over its effects. Heine is full of variety., of light 
and shadow : he alternates between epigrammatic pith, imag- 
inative grace, sly allusion, and daring piquancy ; and athwart 
all these there runs a vein of sadness, tenderness, and grandeur 
which reveals the poet. He continually throws out those finely 
chiselled sayings which stamp themselves on the memory, and 
become familiar by quotation. For example : " The People 
have time enough, they are immortal ; kings only are mortal." 
. — "Wherever a great soul utters its thoughts, there is Gol- 
gotha." — " Nature wanted to see how she looked, and she 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 137 

created Goethe." — " Only the man who has known bodily 
suffering is truly a man ; his limbs have their Passion history, 
they are spiritualized." He calls Rubens " this Flemish Titan, 
the wings of whose genius were so strong that he soared as 
high as the sun, in spite of the hundred-weight of Dutch 
cheeses that hung on his legs." Speaking of Borne's dislike to 
the calm creations of the true artist, he says, " He was like 
a child which, insensible to the glowing significance of a 
Greek statue, only touches the marble, and complains of 
cold." 

The most poetic and specifically humorous of Heine's prose 
writings are the " Reisebilder." The comparison with Sterne 
is inevitable here ; but Heine does not suffer from it, for if he 
falls below Sterne in raciness of humor, he is far above him in 
poetic sensibility and in reach and variety of thought. Heine's 
humor is never persistent, it never flows on long in easy gayety 
and drollery ; where it is not swelled by the tide of poetic feel- 
ing, it is continually dashing down the precipice of a witticism. 
It is not broad and unctuous ; it is aerial and sprite-like, a 
momentary resting-place between his poetry and his wit. In 
the " Reisebilder" he runs through the whole gamut of his 
powers, and gives us every hue of thought, from the wildly 
droll and fantastic to the sombre and the terrible. Here is a 
passage almost Dantesque in conception : 

" Alas ! one ought in truth to write against no one in this world. 
Each of us is sick enough in this great lazaretto, and many a polem- 
ical writing reminds me involuntarily of a revolting quarrel, in a lit- 
tle hospital at Cracow, of which I chanced to be a witness, and where 
it was horrible to hear how the patients mockingly reproached each 
other with their infirmities : how one who was wasted by consump- 
tion jeered at another who was bloated by dropsy ; how one laughed 
at another's cancer in the nose, and this one again at his neighbor's 
locked-jaw or squint, until at last the delirious fever-patient sprang 
out of bed and tore away the coverings from the wounded bodies of 
his companions, and nothing was to be seen but hideous misery and 
mutilation. " 

And how fine is the transition in the very next chapter, 



138 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT. " 

where, after quoting the Homeric description of the feasting 
gods, he says : 

" Then suddenly approached, panting, a pale Jew, with drops of 
blood on his brow, with a crown of thorns on his head, and a great 
cross laid on his shoulders ; and he threw the cross on the high table 
of the gods, so that the golden cups tottered, and the gods became 
dumb and pale, and grew ever paler, till they at last melted away 
into vapor." 

The richest specimens of Heine's wit are perhaps to be found 
in the works which have appeared since the " Reisebilder. " 
The years, if they have intensified his satirical bitterness, have 
also given his wit a finer edge and polish. His sarcasms are so 
subtly prepared and so slily allusive, that they may often 
escape readers whose sense of wit is not very acute ; but for 
those who delight in the subtle and delicate flavors of style, 
there can hardly be any wit more irresistible than Heine's. 
We may measure its force by the degree in which it has sub- 
dued the German language to its purposes, and made that lan- 
guage brilliant in spite of a long hereditary transmission of dul- 
ness. As one of the most harmless examples of his satire, 
take this on a man who has certainly had his share of adula- 
tion : 

" Assuredly it is far from my purpose to depreciate M. Victor Cou- 
sin. The titles of this celebrated philosopher even lay me under an 
obligation to praise him. He belongs to that living pantheon of 
France which we call the peerage, and his intelligent legs rest on the 
velvet benches of the Luxembourg. I must indeed sternly repress 
all private feelings which might seduce me into an excessive enthusi- 
asm. Otherwise I might be suspected of servility ; for M. Cousin is 
very influential in the State by means of his position and his 
tongue. This consideration might even move me to speak of his 
faults as frankly as of his virtues. Will he himself disapprove of this ? 
Assuredly not. I know that we cannot do higher honor to great 
minds than when we throw as strong a light on their demerits as on 
their merits. When we sing the praises of a Hercules, we must also 
mention that he once laid aside the lion's skin and sat down to the 
distaff : what then ? he remains notwithstanding a Hercules ! So 
when we relate similar circumstances concerning M. Cousin, we 



GERMAN WIT : HENRY HEINE. 139 

must nevertheless add, with discriminating eulogy : M. Cousin, if he 
has sometimes sat twaddling at the distaff, has never laid aside the lion's 
skin. . . . It is true that, having been suspected of demagogy, 
he spent some time in a German prison, just as Lafayette and Rich- 
ard Coeur de Lion. But that M. Cousin there in his leisure hours 
studied Kant's ' Critique of Pure Reason' is to be doubted on three 
grounds. First, this book is written in German. Secondly, in order 
to read this book, a man must understand German. Thirdly, M. 
Cousin does not understand German. ... I fear I am passing 
unawares from the sweet waters of praise into the bitter ocean of 
blame. Yes, on one account I cannot refrain from bitterly blaming 
M. Cousin— namely, that he who loves truth far more than he loves 
Plato and Tenneman is unjust to himself when he wants to persuade 
us that he has borrowed something from the philosophy of Schelling 
and Hegel. Against this self -accusation I must take M. Cousin un- 
der my protection. On my word and conscience ! this honorable 
man has not stolen a jot from Schelling and Hegel, and if he brought 
home anything of theirs, it was merely their friendship. That does 
honor to his heart. But there are many instances of such false self- 
accusation in psychology. I knew a man who declared that he had 
stolen silver spoons at the king' s table ; and yet we all knew that the 
poor devil had never been presented at court, and accused himself of 
stealing these spoons to make us believe that he had been a guest at 
the palace. No ! In German philosophy M. Cousin has always kept 
the sixth commandment ; here he has never pocketed a single idea, 
not so much as a salt-spoon of an idea. All witnesses agree in at- 
testing that in this respect M. Cousin is honor itself. ... I 
prophesy to you that the renown of M. Cousin, like the French Rev- 
olution, will go round the world ! I hear some one wickedly add : 
Undeniably the renown of M. Cousin is going round the world, and 
it has already taken its departure from France." 

The following " symbolical myth" about Louis Philippe is 
very characteristic of Heme's mariner : 

" I remember very well that immediately on my arrival (in Paris) 
I hastened to the Palais Royal to see Louis Philippe. The friend 
who conducted me told me that the king now appeared on the ter- 
race only at stated hours, but that formerly he was to be seen at any 
time for five francs. ' For five francs ! ' I cried with amazement ; 
' does he then show himself for money ? ' ' No, but he is shown for 
money, and it happens in this way : There is a society of claqueurs, 
marchands de coniremarques, and such riff-raff, who offered every 



140 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

foreigner to show Mm the king for five francs : if he would give ten 
francs, he might see the king raise his eyes to heaven, and lay his 
hand protestingly on his heart ; if he would give twenty francs, the 
king would sing the Marseillaise. If the foreigner gave five francs, 
they raised a loud cheering under the king's windows, and His Maj- 
esty appeared on the terrace, bowed, and retired. If ten francs, they 
shouted still louder, and gesticulated as if they had been possessed, 
when the king appeared, who then, as a sign of silent emotion, raised 
his eyes to heaven and laid his hand on his heart. English visitors, 
however, would sometimes spend as much as twenty francs, and then 
the enthusiasm mounted to the highest pitch ; no sooner did the 
king appear on the terrace than the Marseillaise was struck up and 
roared out frightfully, until Louis Philippe, perhaps only for the 
sake of putting an end to the singing, bowed, laid his hand on his 
heart, and joined in the Marseillaise. Whether, as is asserted, he 
beat time with his foot, I cannot say.' w 

One more quotation, and it must be our last : 

44 Oh the women ! We must forgive them much, for they love 
much — and many. Their hate is properly only love turned inside 
out. Sometimes they attribute some delinquency to us, because they 
think they can in this way gratify another man. When they write, 
they have always one eye on the paper and the other on a man ; and 
this is true of all authoresses, except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who 
has only one eye." 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE.* 

It is an interesting branch of psychological observation to 
note the images that are habitually associated with abstract or 
collective terms — what may be called the picture-writing of the 
mind, which it carries on concurrently with the more subtle 
symbolism of language. Perhaps the fixity or variety of these 
associated images would furnish a tolerably fair test of the 
amount of concrete knowledge and experience which a given 
word represents, in the minds of two persons who use it with 
equal familiarity. The word railways, for example, will prob- 
ably call up, in the mind of a man who is not highly locomo- 
tive, the image either of a " Bradshaw," or of the station with 
which he is most familiar, or of an indefinite length of tram- 
road ; he will alternate between these three images, which rep- 
resent his stock of concrete acquaintance with railways. But 
suppose a man to have had successively the experience of a 
11 navvy," an engineer, a traveller, a railway director and 
shareholder, and a landed proprietor in treaty with a railway 
company, and it is probable that the range of images which 
would by turns present themselves to his mind at the mention 
of the word " railways," would include all the essential facts 
in the existence and relations of the thing. Now it is possible 
for the first-mentioned personage to entertain very expanded 
views as to the multiplication of railways in the abstract, and 
their ultimate function in civilization. He may talk of a vast 

* 1. " Die Burgerliche Gesellschaft." Von W. H. Eiehl. Dritte 
Auflage. 1855. 2. " Land und Leute." Von W. H. Riehl. Dritte 
Auflage. 1856. 



142 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

net-work of railways stretching over the globe, of future 
" lines" in Madagascar, and elegant refreshment-rooms in the 
Sandwich Islands, with none the less glibness because his dis- 
tinct conceptions on the subject do not extend beyond his one 
station and his indefinite length of tram-road. But it is evi- 
dent that if we want a railway to be made, or its affairs to be 
managed, this man of wide views and narrow observation will 
not serve our purpose. 

Probably, if we could ascertain the images called up by the 
terms " the people," " the masses," " the proletariat," " the 
peasantry," by many who theorize on those bodies with elo- 
quence, or who legislate without eloquence, we should find that 
they indicate almost as small an amount of concrete knowledge 
— that they are as far from completely representing the com- 
plex facts summed up in the collective term, as the railway 
images of our non-locomotive gentleman. How little the real 
characteristics of the working-classes are known to those who 
are outside them, how little their natural history has been 
studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our Art as well as by our 
political and social theories. Where, in our picture exhibi- 
tions, shall we find a group of true peasantry ? What English 
artist even attempts to rival in truthfulness such studies of pop- 
ular life as the pictures of Teniers or the ragged boys of 
Murillo ? Even one of the greatest painters of the pre-emi- 
nently realistic school, while, in his picture of " The Hireling 
Shepherd, ' ' he gave us a landscape of marvellous truthfulness, 
placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who were not much 
more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our chimney 
ornaments. Only a total absence of acquaintance and sympathy 
with our peasantry could give a moment's popularity to such 
a picture as " Cross Purposes," where we have a peasant girl 
who looks as if she knew L. E. L.'s poems by heart, and Eng- 
lish rustics, whose costume seems to indicate that they are 
meant for ploughmen, with exotic features that remind us of a 
handsome primo tenore. Rather than such cockney sentimen- 
tality as this, as an education for the taste and sympathies, we 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 143 

prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever 
painted. But even those among our painters who aim at giv- 
ing the rustic type of features, who are far above the effeminate 
feebleness of the " Keepsake" style, treat their subjects under 
the influence of traditions and prepossessions rather than of 
direct observation. The notion that peasants are joyous, that 
the typical moment to represent a man in a smock-frock is 
when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound teeth, 
that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children 
necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge 
from the artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into litera- 
ture instead of life. The painter is still under the influence of 
idyllic literature, which has always expressed the imagination 
of the cultivated and town-bred, rather than the truth of rustic 
life. Idyllic ploughmen are jocund when they drive their team 
afield ; idyllic shepherds make bashful love under hawthorn 
bushes ; idyllic villagers dance in the checkered shade and re- 
t fresh themselves, not immoderately, with spicy nut-brown ale. 
But no one who has seen much of actual ploughmen thinks 
them jocund ; no one who is well acquainted with the English 
peasantry can pronounce them merry. The slow gaze, in which 
no sense of beauty beams, no humor twinkles, the slow utter- 
ance, and the heavy, slouching walk, remind one rather of that 
melancholy animal the camel than of the sturdy countryman, 
with striped stockings, red waistcoat, and hat aside, who rep- 
resents the traditional English peasant. Observe a company 
of haymakers. When you see them at a distance, tossing up 
the forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the wagon creeps 
slowly with its increasing burden over* the meadow, and the 
bright green space which tells of work done gets larger and 
larger, you pronounce the scene "smiling," and you think 
these companions in labor must be as bright and cheerful as 
the picture to which they give animation. Approach nearer, 
and you will certainly find that haymaking time is a time for 
joking, especially if there are women among the laborers ; but 
the coarse laugh that bursts out every now and then, and ex- 



144 THE ESSAYS OF 

presses the triumphant taunt, is as far as possible from your 
conception of idyllic merriment. That delicious effervescence 
of the mind which we call fun has no equivalent for the north- 
ern peasant, except tipsy revelry ; the only realm of fancy and 
imagination for the English clown exists at the bottom of the 
third quart pot. 

The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up 
pocket-books and never looks into them, and who is too simple 
even to know that honesty has its opposite, represents the still 
lingering mistake, that an unintelligible dialect is a guarantee 
for ingenuousness, and that slouching shoulders indicate an up- 
right disposition. It is quite true that a thresher is likely to 
be innocent of any adroit arithmetical cheating, but he is not 
the less likely to carry home his master's corn in his shoes and 
pocket ; a reaper is not given to writing begging-letters, but he 
is quite capable of cajoling the dairymaid into filling his small- 
beer bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are not subdued by 
the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least established 
by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make men 
moral something more is requisite than to turn them out to 
grass. 

Opera peasants, whose unreality excites Mr. Ruskin's indig- 
nation, are surely too frank an idealization to be misleading ; 
and since popular chorus is one of the most effective elements 
of the opera, we can hardly object to lyric rustics in elegant 
laced boddices and picturesque motley, unless we are prepared 
to advocate a chorus of colliers in their pit costume, or a ballet 
of charwomen and stocking-weavers. But our social novels 
profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of 
their representations is a grave evil. The greatest benefit we 
owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the ex- 
tension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generaliza- 
tions and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral 
sentiment already in activity ; but a picture of human life 
such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and 
the selfish into that attention to what is a part from themselves, 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 145 

■which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. 
When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit's cottage, or 
tells the story of "The Two Drovers ;" when Wordsworth 
sings to us the reverie of " Poor Susan ;" when Kingsley 
shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which 
leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw ; when 
Hornung paints a group of chimney-sweepers — more is done 
toward linking the higher classes with the lower, toward oblit- 
erating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by hundreds of ser- 
mons and philosophical dissertations. x\rt is the nearest thing 
to life ; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending 
our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our per- 
sonal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when 
he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification 
here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects 
of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false 
ideas about evanescent fashions — about the manners and con- 
versation of beaux and duchesses ; but it mi serious that our 
sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the 
tragedy, and the humor in the life of our more heavily laden 
fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned toward a false ob- 
ject instead of the true one. 

This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresen- 
tation which give rise to it has what the artist considers a 
moral end. The thing for mankind to know is, not what arc 
the motives and influences which the moralist thinks ought to 
act on the laborer or the artisan, but what are the motives and 
influences which do act on him. We want to be taught to feel, 
not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for 
the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his 
suspicious selfishness. 

We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost 
power of rendering the external traits of our town population ; 
and if he could give us their psychological character — their 
conception of life, and their emotions — with the same truth as 
their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest con- 



146 THE ESSAYS OF 

tribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sym- 
pathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish's colloquial 
style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while there is 
the same startling inspiration in his description of the gestures 
and phrases of " Boots," as in the speeches of Shakespeare's 
mobs or numskulls, he scarcely ever passes from the humorous 
and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as 
transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his 
artistic truthfulness. But for the precious salt of his humor, 
which compels him to reproduce external traits that serve in 
some degree as a corrective to his frequently false psychology, 
his preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melo- 
dramatic boatmen and courtesans, would be as obnoxious as 
Eugene Sue's idealized proletaires, in encouraging the miser- 
able fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow 
out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and want ; or that the 
working-classes are in a condition to enter at once into a mil- 
lennial state of altruism, wherein every one is caring for every- 
one else, and no one for himself. 

If we need a true conception of the popular character to 
guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our 
theories, and direct us in their application. The tendency 
created by the splendid conquests of modern generalization, to 
believe that all social questions are merged in economical 
science, and that the relations of men to their neighbors may 
be settled by algebraic equations — the dream that the un- 
cultured classes are prepared for a condition which appeals 
principally to their moral sensibilities — the aristocractic dilet- 
tantism which attempts to restore the " good old times" by a 
sort of idyllic masquerading, and to grow feudal fidelity and 
veneration as we grow prize turnips, by an artificial system of 
culture — none of these diverging mistakes can coexist with a 
real knowledge of the people, with a thorough study of their 
habits, their ideas, their motives. The landholder, the clergy- 
man, the mill -owner, the mining-agent, have each an oppor- 
tunity for making precious observations on different sections 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 147 

of the working-classes, but unfortunately their experience is 
too often not registered at all, or its results are too scattered 
to be available as a source of information and stimulus to the 
public mind general!}'. If any man of sufficient moral and 
intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated 
by a foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, 
would devote himself to studying the natural history of our 
social classes, especially of the small shopkeepers, artisans, and 
peasantry — the degree in which they are influenced by local 
conditions, their maxims and habits, the points of view from 
which they regard their religious teachers, and the degree in 
which they are influenced by religious doctrines, the interaction 
of the various classes on each other, and what are the tenden- 
cies in their position toward disintegration or toward develop- 
ment — and if, after all this study, he would give us the result 
of his observation in a book well nourished with specific facts, 
his work would be a valuable aid to the social and political 
reformer. 

What we are desiring for ourselves has been in some degree 
done for the Germans by Riehl, the author of the very 
remarkable books, the titles of which are placed at the head of 
this article ; and we wish to make these books known to our 
readers, not only for the sake of the interesting matter they 
contain, and the important reflections they suggest, but also as 
a model for some future or actual student of our own people. 
By way of introducing Riehl to those who are unacquainted 
with his writings, we will give a rapid sketch from his picture 
of the German Peasantry, and perhaps this indication of the 
mode in wdiich he treats a particular branch of his subject 
may prepare them to follow us with more interest when we 
enter on the general purpose and contents of his works. 

In England, at present, when we speak of the peasantry we 
mean scarcely more than the class of farm-servants and farm- 
laborers ; and it is only in the most primitive districts, as in 
Wales, for example, that farmers are included under the term. 
In order to appreciate what Riehl says of the German peas- 



148 THE ESSAYS OF 

antry, we must remember what the tenant-farmers and small 
proprietors were in England half a century ago, when the 
master helped to milk his own cows, and the daughters got up 
at one o'clock in the morning to brew — when the family 
dined in the kitchen with the servants, and sat with them 
round the kitchen fire in the evening. In those days, the 
quarried parlor was innocent of a carpet, and its only speci- 
mens of art were a framed sampler and the best tea-board ; the 
daughters even of substantial farmers had often no greater ac- 
complishment in writing and spelling than they could procure 
at a dame-school ; and, instead of carrying on sentimental 
correspondence, they were spinning their future table-linen, 
and looking after every saving in butter and eggs that might 
enable them to add to the little stock of plate and china which 
they were laying in against their marriage. In our own day, 
setting aside the superior order of farmers, whose style of 
living and mental culture are often equal to that of the pro- 
fessional class in provincial towns, we can hardly enter the least 
imposing farm-house without finding a bad piano in the 
" drawing-room," and some old annuals, disposed with a sym- 
metrical imitation of negligence, on the table ; though the 
daughters may still drop their A's, their vowels are studiously 
narrow ; and it is only in very primitive regions that they will 
consent to sit in a covered vehicle without springs, which was 
once thought an advance in luxury on the pillion. 

The condition of the tenant-farmers and small proprietors in 
Germany is, we imagine, about on a par, not, certainly, in 
material prosperity, but in mental culture and habits, with 
that of the English farmers who were beginning to be thought 
old-fashioned nearly fifty years ago, and if we add to these the 
farm servants and laborers we shall have a class approximating 
in its characteristics to the Bauernthum y or peasantry, de- 
scribed by Riehl. 

In Germany, perhaps more than in any other country, it is 
among the peasantry that we must look for the historical type 
of the national physique. In the towns this type has become 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 149 

so modified to express the personality of the individual that 
even " family likeness' ' is often but faintly marked. But the 
peasants may still be distinguished into groups, by their 
physical peculiarities. In one part of the country we find a 
longer-legged, in another a broader-shouldered race, which has 
inherited these peculiarities for centuries. For example, in 
certain districts of Hesse are seen long faces, with high fore- 
heads, long, straight noses, and small eyes, with arched eye- 
brows and large eyelids. On comparing these physiognomies 
with the sculptures in the church of St. Elizabeth, at Marburg, 
executed in the thirteenth century, it will be found that the 
same old Hessian type of face has subsisted unchanged, with 
this distinction only, that the sculptures represent princes and 
nobles, whose features then bore the stamp of their race, while 
that stamp is now to be found only among the peasants. A 
painter who wants to draw mediaeval characters with historic 
truth must seek his models among the peasantry. This ex- 
plains why the old German painters gave the heads of their 
subjects a greater uniformity of type than the painters of our 
day ; the race had not attained to a high degree of individ- 
ualization in features and expression. It indicates, too, that 
the cultured man acts more as an individual, the peasant more 
as one of a group. Hans drives the plough, lives, and thinks 
just as Kunz does ; and it is this fact that many thousands of 
men are as like each other in thoughts and habits as so many 
sheep or oysters, which constitutes the weight of the peasantry 
in the social and political scale. 

In the cultivated world each individual has his style of 
speaking and writing. But among the peasantry it is the race, 
the district, the province, that has its style— namely, its 
dialect, its phraseology, its proverbs, and its songs, which 
belong alike to the entire body of the people. This provincial 
style of the peasant is again, like his 'physique, a remnant of 
history, to which he clings with the utmost tenacity. In 
certain parts of Hungary there are still descendants of German 
colonists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who go about 



150 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

the country as reapers, retaining their old Saxon songs and 
manners, while the more cultivated German emigrants in a 
very short time forget their own language, and speak Hun- 
garian. Another remarkable case of the same kind is that of 
the Wends, a Slavonic race settled in Lusatia, whose numbers 
amount to 200,000, living either scattered among the German 
population or in separate parishes. They have their own 
schools and churches, and are taught in the Slavonic tongue. 
The Catholics among them are rigid adherents of the Pope ; 
the Protestants not less rigid adherents of Luther, or Doctor 
Luther, as they are particular in calling him — a custom which 
a hundred years ago was universal in Protestant Germany. 
The Wend clings tenaciously to the usages of his Church, and 
perhaps this may contribute not a little to the purity in which 
he maintains the specific characteristics of his race. German 
education, German law and government, service in the standing 
army, and many other agencies, are in antagonism to his 
national exclusiveness ; but the wives and mothers here, as 
elsewhere, are a conservative influence, and the habits tem- 
porarily laid aside in the outer world are recovered by the 
fireside. The Wends form several stout regiments in the 
Saxon army ; they are sought far and wide, as diligent and 
honest servants ; and many a weakly Dresden or Leipzig child 
becomes thriving under the care of a Wendish nurse. In their 
villages they have the air and habits of genuine sturdy peasants, 
and all their customs indicate that they have been from the 
first an agricultural people. For example, they have tradi- 
tional modes of treating their domestic animals. Each cow 
has its own name, generally chosen carefully, so as to express 
the special qualities of the animal ; and all important family 
events are narrated to the bees — a custom which is found also 
in Westphalia. Whether by the help of the bees or not, the 
Wend farming is especially prosperous ; and when a poor 
Bohemian peasant has a son born to him he binds him to the 
end of a long pole and turns his face toward Lusatia, that he 
may be as lucky as the Wends, who live there. 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 151 

The peculiarity of the peasant's language consists chiefly in 
his retention of historical peculiarities, which gradually dis- 
appear under the friction of cultivated circles. He prefers any 
proper name that may be given to a day in the calendar, rather 
than the abstract date, by which he very rarely reckons. In 
the baptismal names of his children he is guided by the old 
custom of the country, not at all by whim and fancy. Many 
old baptismal names, formerly common in Germany, would 
have become extinct but for their preservation among the 
peasantry, especially in North Germany ; and so firmly have 
they adhered to local tradition in this matter that it would be 
possible to give a sort of topographical statistics of proper 
names, and distinguish a district by its rustic names as we do 
by its Flora and Fauna. The continuous inheritance of certain 
favorite proper names in a family, in some districts, forces the 
peasant to adopt the princely custom of attaching a numeral to 
the name, and saying, when three generations are living at 
once, Hans I., II., and III.; or — in the more antique fashion 
— Hans the elder, the middle, and the younger. In some of 
our English counties there is a similar adherence to a narrow 
range of proper names, and a mode of distinguishing collateral 
branches in the same family, you will hear of Jonathan's Bess, 
Thomas's Bess, and Samuel's Bess — the three Bessies being 
cousins. 

The peasant's adherence to the traditional has much greater 
inconvenience than that entailed by a paucity of proper names. 
In the Black Forest and in Hiittenberg you will see him in 
the dog-days wearing a thick fur cap, because it is an historical 
fur cap — a cap worn by his grandfather. In the Wetterau, 
that peasant girl is considered the handsomest who wears 
the most petticoats. To go to field-labor in seven pet- 
ticoats can be anything but convenient or agreeable, but it is 
the traditionally correct thing, and a German peasant girl 
would think herself as unfavorably conspicuous in an untradi- 
tional costume as an English servant-girl would now think 
herself in a " linsey-wolsey" apron or a thick muslin cap. In 



152 THE ESSAYS OP "GEORGE ELIOT." 

many districts no medical advice would induce the rustic to 
renounce the tight leather belt with which he injures his 
digestive functions ; you could more easily persuade him to 
smile on a new communal system than on the unhistorical 
invention of braces. In the eighteenth century, in spite of the 
philanthropic preachers of potatoes, the peasant for years threw 
his potatoes to the pigs and the dogs, before he could be 
persuaded to put them on his own table. However, the un- 
willingness of the peasant to adopt innovations has a not 
unreasonable foundation in the fact that for him experiments 
are practical, not theoretical, and must be made with expense 
of money instead of brains — a fact that is not, perhaps, 
sufficiently taken into account by agricultural theorists, who 
complain of the farmer's obstinacy. The peasant has the 
smallest possible faith in theoretic knowledge ; he thinks it 
rather dangerous than otherwise, as is well indicated by a 
Lower Rhenish proverb — " One is never too old to learn, said 
an old woman ; so she learned to be a witch." 

Between many villages an historical feud, once perhaps the 
occasion of much bloodshed, is still kept up under the milder 
form of an occasional round of cudgelling and the launching 
of traditional nicknames. An historical feud of this kind still 
exists, for example, among many villages on the Rhine and 
more inland places in the neighborhood. Bheinschnacke (of 
which the equivalent is perhaps " water-snake") is the stand- 
ing term of ignominy for the inhabitant of the Rhine village, 
who repays it in kind by the epithet " karst" (mattock), or 
" kukuk" (cuckoo), according as the object of his hereditary 
hatred belongs to the field or the forest. If any Romeo among 
the " mattocks" were to marry a Juliet among the " water- 
snakes," there would be no lack of Tybalts and Mercutios to 
carry the conflict from words to blows, though neither side 
knows a reason for the enmity. 

A droll instance of peasant conservatism is told of a village 
on the Taunus, whose inhabitants, from time immemorial, had 
been famous for impromptu cudgelling. For this historical 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 153 

offence the magistrates of the district had always inflicted the 
equally historical punishment of shutting up the most incor- 
rigible offenders, not in prison, but in their own pig-sty. In 
recent times, however, the government, wishing to correct the 
rudeness of these peasants, appointed an " enlightened" man 
as a magistrate, who at once abolished the original penalty 
above mentioned. But this relaxation of punishment was so 
far from being welcome to the villagers that they presented a 
petition praying that a more energetic man might be given 
them as a magistrate, who would have the courage to punish 
according to law and justice, " as had been beforetime." And 
the magistrate who abolished incarceration in the pig-sty could 
never obtain the respect of the neighborhood. This happened 
no longer ago than the beginning of the present century. 

But it must not be supposed that the historical piety of the 
German peasant extends to anything not immediately connected 
with himself. He has the warmest piety toward the old 
tumble-down house which his grandfather built, and which 
nothing will induce him to improve, but toward the venerable 
ruins of the old castle that overlooks his village he has no piety 
at all, and carries off its stones to make a fence for his garden, 
or tears down the gothic carving of the old monastic church, 
which is " nothing to him," to mark off a foot-path through 
his field. It is the same with historical traditions. The 
peasant has them fresh in his memory, so far as they relate to 
himself. In districts where the peasantry are unadulterated, 
you can discern the remnants of the feudal relations in innumer- 
able customs and phrases, but you will ask in vain for histori- 
cal traditions concerning the empire, or even concerning the 
particular princely house to which the peasant is subject. 
He can tell you what " half people and whole people" mean ; 
in Hesse you will still hear of " four horses making a whole 
peasant," or of " four-day and three-day peasants ;" but you 
will ask in vain about Charlemagne and Frederic Barbarossa. 

Riehl well observes that the feudal system, which made the 
peasant the bondman of his lord, was an immense benefit in a 



154 THE ESSAYS OF 

country, the greater part of which had still to be colonized — 
rescued the peasant from vagabondage, and laid the foundation 
of persistency and endurance in future generations. If a free 
German peasantry belongs only to modern times, it is to his 
ancestor who was a serf, and even, in the earliest times, a 
slave, that the peasant owes the foundation of his indepen- 
dence, namely, his capability of a settled existence — nay, his 
unreasoning persistency, which has its important function in 
the development of the race. 

Perhaps the very worst result of that unreasoning per- 
sistency is the peasant's inveterate habit of litigation. Every 
one remembers the immortal description of Dandie Dinmont's 
importunate application to Lawyer Pleydell to manage his " bit 
lawsuit/' till at length Pleydell consents to help him to ruin him- 
self, on the ground that Dandie may fall into worse hands. It- 
seems this is a scene which has many parallels in Germany. 
The farmer's lawsuit is his point of honor ; and he will carry 
it through, though he knows from the very first day that he 
shall get nothing by it. The litigious peasant piques himself, 
like Mr. Saddletree, on his knowledge of the law, and this vanity 
is the chief impulse to many a lawsuit. To the mind of the 
peasant, law presents itself as the " custom of the country," 
and it is his pride to be versed in all customs. Custom with 
him holds the place of sentiment, of theory, and in many cases 
of affection. Riehl justly urges the importance of simplifying 
law proceedings, so as to cut off this vanity at its source, and 
also of encouraging, by every possible means, the practice of 
arbitration. 

The peasant never begins his lawsuit in summer, for the same 
reason that he does not make love and marry in summer — 
because he has no time for that sort of thing. Anything is 
easier to him than to move out of his habitual course, and he 
is attached even to his privations. Some years ago a peasant 
youth, out of the poorest and remotest region of the Wester- 
wald, was enlisted as a recruit, at Weilburg in Nassau. The 
lad, having never in his life slept in a bed, when he had got 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 155 

into one for the first time be^an to cry like a child ; and he 
deserted twice because he could not reconcile himself to sleep- 
ing in a bed, and to the " fine" life of the barracks : he was 
homesick at the thought of his accustomed poverty and his 
thatched hut. A strong contrast, this, with the feeling of the 
poor in towns, who would be far enough from deserting be- 
cause their condition was too much improved ! The genuine 
peasant is never ashamed of his rank and calling ; he is rather 
inclined to look down on every one who does not wear a 
smock frock, and thinks a man who has the manners of the 
gentry is likely to be rather windy and unsubstantial. In 
some places, even in French districts, this feeling is strongly 
symbolized by the practice of the peasantry, on certain festival 
days, to dress the images of the saints in peasant's clothing. 
History tells us of all kinds of peasant insurrections, the object 
of which was to obtain relief for the peasants from some of 
their many oppressions ; but of an effort on their part to step 
out of their hereditary rank and calling, to become gentry, to 
leave the plough and carry on the easier business of capitalists 
or government functionaries, there is no example. 

The German novelists who undertake to give pictures of 
peasant-life fall into the same mistake as our English novelists : 
they transfer their own feelings to ploughmen and wood- 
cutters, and give them both joys and sorrows of which they 
know nothing. The peasant never questions the obligation of 
family ties — he questions no custom — but tender affection, as it 
exists among the refined part of mankind, is almost as foreign 
to him as white hands and filbert-shaped nails. That the aged 
father who has given up his property to his children on condition 
of their maintaining him for the remainder of his life, is very 
far from meeting with delicate attentions, is indicated by the 
proverb current among the peasantry — " Don't take your 
clothes off before you go to bed." Among rustic moral tales 
and parables, not one is more universal than the story of the 
ungrateful children, who made their gray-headed father, 
dependent on them for a maintenance, eat at a wooden trough 



156 THE ESSA.YS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

because he shook the food out of his trembling hands. Then 
these same ungrateful children observed one day that their own 
little boy was making a tiny wooden trough ; and when they 
asked him what it was for, he answered — that his father and 
mother might eat out of it, when he was a man and had to 
keep them. 

Marriage is a very prudential affair, especially among the 
peasants who have the largest share of property. Politic 
marriages are as common among them as among princes ; and 
when a peasant-heiress in Westphalia marries, her husband 
adopts her name, and places his own after it with the prefix 
geborner (nee). The girls marry young, and the rapidity with 
which they get old and ugly is one among the many proofs 
that the early years of marriage are fuller of hardships than of 
conjugal tenderness. il When our writers of village stories," 
says Riehl, " transferred their own emotional life to the 
peasant, they obliterated what is precisely his most predomi- 
nant characteristic, namely, that with him general custom holds 
the place of individual feeling. " 

We pay for greater emotional susceptibility too often by 
nervous diseases of which the peasant knows nothing. To him 
headache is the least of physical evils, because he thinks head- 
work the easiest and least indispensable of all labor. Happily, 
many of the younger sons in peasant families, by going to seek 
their living in the towns, carry their hardy nervous system to 
amalgamate with the overwrought nerves of our town popula- 
tion, and refresh them with a little rude vigor. And a return 
to the habits of peasant life is the best remedy for many moral 
as well as physical diseases induced by perverted civilization. 
Riehl points to colonization as presenting the true field for this 
regenerative process. On the other side of the ocean a man 
will have the courage to begin life again as a peasant, while at 
home, perhaps, opportunity as well as courage will fail him. 
Apropos of this subject of emigration, he remarks the striking 
fact, that the native shrewdness and mother-wit of the German 
peasant seem to forsake him entirely when he has to apply 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 157 

them under new circumstances, and on relations foreign to his 
experience. Hence it is that the German peasant who emi- 
grates, so constantly falls a victim to unprincipled adventurers 
in the preliminaries to emigration ; but if once he gets his foot 
on the American soil he exhibits all the first-rate qualities of 
an agricultural colonist ; and among all German emigrants the 
peasant class are the most successful. 

But many disintegrating forces have been at work on the 
peasant character, and degeneration is unhappily going on at a 
greater pace than development. In the wine districts especial- 
ly, the inability of the small proprietors to bear up under the 
vicissitudes of the market, or to insure a high quality of wine 
by running the risks of a late vintage and the competition of 
beer and cider with the inferior wines, have tended to produce 
that uncertainty of gain which, with the peasant, is the inevi- 
table cause of demoralization. The small peasant proprietors 
are not a new class in Germany, but many of the evils of their 
position are new. They are more dependent on ready money 
than formerly ; thus, where a peasant used to get his wood for 
building and firing from the common forest, he has now to pay 
for it with hard cash ; he used to thatch his own house, with 
the help perhaps of a neighbor, but now he pays a man to 
do it for him ; he used to pay taxes in kind, he now pays 
them in money. The chances of the market have to be dis- 
counted, and the peasant falls into the hands of money-lenders. 
Here is one of the cases in which social policy clashes with a 
purely economical policy. 

Political vicissitudes have added their influence to that of 
economical changes in disturbing that dim instinct, that 
reverence for traditional custom, which is the peasant's prin- 
ciple of action. He is in the midst of novelties for which he 
knows no reason — changes in political geography, changes of 
the government to which he owes fealty, changes in bureau- 
cratic management and police regulations. He finds himself 
in a new element before an apparatus for breathing in it is 
developed in him. His only knowledge of modern history is 



158 THE ESSAYS OF 

in some of its results — for instance, that he has to pay heavier 
taxes from year to year. His chief idea of a government is of 
a power that raises his taxes, opposes his harmless customs, 
and torments him with new formalities. The source of all this 
is the false system of " enlightening" the peasant which has 
been adopted by the bureaucratic governments. A system 
which disregards the traditions and hereditary attachments of 
the peasant, and appeals only to a logical understanding which 
is not yet developed in him, is simply disintegrating and 
ruinous to the peasant character. The interference with the 
communal regulations has been of this fatal character. Instead 
of endeavoring to promote to the utmost the healthy life of the 
Commune, as an organism the conditions of which are bound 
up with the historical characteristics of the peasant, the 
bureaucratic plan of government is bent on improvement by 
its patent machinery of state-appointed functionaries and off- 
hand regulations in accordance with modern enlightenment. 
The spirit of communal exclusiveness — the resistance to the 
indiscriminate establishment of strangers, is an intense tradi- 
tional feeling in the peasant. " This gallows is for us and our 
children," is the typical motto of this spirit. But such ex- 
clusiveness is highly irrational and repugnant to modern 
liberalism ; therefore a bureaucratic government at once op- 
poses it, and encourages to the utmost the introduction of new 
inhabitants in the provincial communes. Instead of allowing 
the peasants to manage their own affairs, and, if they happen 
to believe that live and four make eleven, to unlearn the prej- 
udice by their own experience in calculation, so that they may 
gradually understand processes, and not merely see results, 
bureaucracy comes with its " Ready Reckoner" and works all 
the peasant's sums for him — the surest way of maintaining 
him in his stupidity, however it may shake his prejudice. 

Another questionable plan for elevating the peasant is the 
supposed elevation of the clerical character by preventing the 
clergyman from cultivating more than a trifling part of the land 
attached to his benefice ; that he may be as much as possible of 



THE NATUBAL HISTOHY OF GEEMAN LIFE. 159 

a scientific theologian, and as little as possible of a peasant. In 
this, Riehl observes, lies one great source of weakness to the 
Protestant Church as compared with the Catholic, which finds 
the great majority of its priests among the lower orders ; and 
we have had the opportunity of making an analogous com- 
parison in England, where many of us can remember country 
districts in which the great mass of the people were christian- 
ized by illiterate Methodist and Independent ministers, while 
the influence of the parish clergyman among the poor did not 
extend much beyond a few old women in scarlet cloaks and a 
few exceptional church-going laborers. 

Bearing in mind the general characteristics of the German 
peasant, it is easy to understand his relation to the revolution- 
ary ideas and revolutionary movements of modern times. The 
peasant, in Germany as elsewhere, is a born grumbler. He has 
always plenty of grievances in his pocket, but he does not 
generalize those grievances ; he does not complain of " govern- 
ment" or " society," probably because he has good reason to 
complain of the burgomaster. When a few sparks from the 
first French Revolution fell among the German peasantry, and 
in certain villages of Saxony the country people assembled 
together to write down their demands, there was no glimpse in 
their petition of the " universal rights of man," but simply of 
their own particular affairs as Saxon peasants. Again, after the 
July revolution of 1830, there were many insignificant peasant 
insurrections ; but the object of almost all was the removal of 
local grievances. Toll-houses were pulled down ; stamped paper 
was destroyed ; in some places there was a persecution of wild 
boars, in others, of that plentiful tame animal, the German 
Rath, or councillor who is never called into council. But in 
1848 it seemed as if the movements of the peasants had taken 
a new character ; in the small western states of Germany it 
seemed as if the whole class of peasantry was in insurrection. 
But, in fact, the peasant did not know the meaning of the part 
he was playing. He had heard that everything was being set 
right in the towns, and that wonderful things were happening 



1G0 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

there, so he tied up his bundle and set off. Without any 
distinct object or resolution, the country people presented 
themselves on the scene of commotion, and were warmly re- 
ceived by the party leaders. But, seen from the windows of 
ducal palaces and ministerial hotels, these swarms of peasants 
had quite another aspect, and it was imagined that they had a 
common plan of co-operation. This, however, the peasants have 
never had. Systematic co-operation implies general concep- 
tions, and a provisional subordination of egoism, to which even 
the artisans of towns have rarely shown themselves equal, and 
which are as foreign to the mind of the peasant as logarithms 
or the doctrine of chemical proportions. And the revolu- 
tionary fervor of the peasant was soon cooled. The old 
mistrust of the towns was reawakened on the spot. The 
Tyrolese peasants saw no great good in the freedom of the 
press and the constitution, because these changes ' ' seemed to 
please the gentry so much." Peasants who had given their 
voices stormily for a German parliament asked afterward, 
with a doubtful look, whether it were to consist of infantry or 
cavalry. When royal domains were declared the property of 
the State, the peasants in some small principalities rejoiced 
over this, because they interpreted it to mean that every one 
would have his share in them, after the manner of the old 
common and forest rights. 

The very practical views of the peasants with regard to the 
demands of the people were in amusing contrast with the 
abstract theorizing of the educated townsmen. The peasant 
continually withheld all State payments until he saw how matters 
would turn out, and was disposed to reckon up the solid benefit, 
in the form of land or money, that might come to him from 
the changes obtained. While the townsman was heating his 
brains about representation on the broadest basis, the peasant 
asked if the relation between tenant and landlord would con- 
tinue as before, and whether the removal of the " feudal obli- 
gations ' meant that the farmer should become owner of the 
land? 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 161 

It is in the same naive way that Communism is interpreted 
by the German peasantry. The wide spread among them of 
communistic doctrines, the eagerness with which they listened 
to a plan for the partition of property, seemed to countenance 
the notion that it was a delusion to suppose the peasant would 
be secured from this intoxication by his love of secure posses- 
sion and peaceful earnings. But, in fact, the peasant contem- 
plated "partition" by the light of an historical reminiscence 
rather than of novel theory. The golden age, in the imagina- 
tion of the peasant, was the time when every member of the 
commune had a right to as much wood from the forest as would 
enable him to sell some, after using what he wanted in firing— 
in which the communal possessions were so profitable that, 
instead of his having to pay rates at the end of the year, each 
member of the commune was something in pocket. Hence 
the peasants in general understood by "partition," that the 
State lands, especially the forests, would be divided among the 
communes, and that, by some political legerdemain or other, 
everybody would have free fire- wood, free grazing for his cattle, 
and over and above that, a piece of gold without working for 
it. That he should give up a single clod of his own to further 
the general "partition" had never entered the mind of the 
peasant communist ; and the perception that this was an es- 
sential preliminary to " partition" was often a sufficient cure 
for his Communism. 

In villages lying in the neighborhood of large towns, however, 
where the circumstances of the peasantry are very different, 
quite another interpretation of Communism is prevalent. Here 
the peasant is generally sunk to the position of the proletaire 
living from hand to mouth : he has nothing to lose, but every- 
thing to gain by " partition." The coarse nature of the peas- 
ant has here been corrupted into bestiality by the disturbance 
of his instincts, while he is as yet incapable of principles ; and 
in this type of the degenerate peasant is seen the worst ex- 
ample of ignorance intoxicated by theory. 

A significant hint as to the interpretation the peasants put 



162 THE ESSAYS OF 

on revolutionary theories may be drawn from the way they 
employed the few weeks in which their movements were un- 
checked. They felled the forest trees and shot the game ; 
they withheld taxes ; they shook off the imaginary or real bur- 
dens imposed on them by their mediatized princes, by present- 
ing their " demands" in a very rough way before the ducal or 
princely " Schloss ;" they set their faces against the bureau- 
cratic management of the communes, deposed the government 
functionaries who had been placed over them as burgomasters 
and magistrates, and abolished the whole bureaucratic system 
of procedure, simply by taking no notice of its regulations, and 
recurring to some tradition — some old order or disorder of 
things. In all this it is clear that they were animated not in 
the least by the spirit of modern revolution, but by a purely 
narrow and personal impulse toward reaction. 

The idea of constitutional government lies quite beyond the 
range of the German peasant's conceptions. His only notion 
of representation is that of a representation of ranks — of 
classes ; his only notion of a deputy is of one who takes care, 
not of the national welfare, but of the interests of his own 
order. Herein lay the great mistake of the democratic party, 
in common with the bureaucratic governments, that they 
entirely omitted the peculiar character of the peasant from 
their political calculations. They talked of the " people," 
and forgot that the peasants were included in the term. Only 
a baseless misconception of the peasant's character could induce 
the supposition that he would feel the slightest enthusiasm 
about the principles involved in the reconstitution of the 
Empire, or even about the reconstitution itself. He has 
no zeal for a written law, as such, but only so far as it 
takes the form of a living law — a tradition. It was the ex- 
ternal authority which the revolutionary party had won in 
Baden that attracted the peasants into a participation of the 
struggle. 

Such, Riehl tells us, are the general characteristics of the 
German peasantry — characteristics which subsist amid a wide 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN" LIFE. 163 

variety of circumstances. In Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and 
Brandenburg the peasant lives on extensive estates ; in Westr 
phalia he lives in large isolated homesteads ; in the Westerwald 
and in Sauerland, in little groups of villages and hamlets ; on 
the Rhine land is for the most part parcelled out among small 
proprietors, who live together in large villages. Then, of 
course, the diversified physical geography of Germany gives 
rise to equally diversified methods of land-culture ; and out of 
these various circumstances grow numerous specific differences 
in manner and character. But the generic character of the 
German peasant is everywhere the same ; in the clean moun- 
tain hamlet and in the dirty fishing village on the coast ; in the 
plains of North Germany and in the backwoods of America. 
" Everywhere he has the same historical character — everywhere 
custom is his supreme law. Where religion and patriotism are 
still a naive instinct, are still a sacred custom, there begins the 
class of the German Peasantry.' ' 

Our readers will perhaps already have gathered from the fore- 
going portrait of the German peasant that Riehl is not a man 
who looks at objects through the spectacles either of the doc- 
trinaire or the dreamer ; and they will be ready to believe what 
he tells us in his Preface, namely, that years ago he began his 
wanderings over the hills and plains of Germany for the sake of 
obtaining, in immediate intercourse with the people, that com- 
pletion of his historical, political, and economical studies which 
he was unable to find in books. He began his investigations 
with no party prepossessions, and his present views were 
evolved entirely from his own gradually amassed observations. 
He was, first of all, a pedestrian, and only in the second place 
a political author. The views at which he has arrived by this 
inductive process, he sums up in the term — social -political- 
conservatism ; but his conservatism is, we conceive, of a 
thoroughly philosophical kind. He sees in European society 
incarnate history, and any attempt to disengage it from its his- 
torical elements must, he believes, be simply destructive of 



164 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

social vitality.* What has grown up historically can only die 
out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws. 
The external conditions which society has inherited from the 
past are but the manifestation of inherited internal conditions 
in the human beings who compose it ; the internal conditions 
and the external are related to each other as the organism and 
its medium, and development can take place only by the 
gradual consentaneous development of both. Take the familiar 
example of attempts to abolish titles, which have been about as 
effective as the process of cutting off poppy-heads in a corn- 
field. Jedem Menschem, says Riehl, ist sein Zopf angeboren, 
warum soil denn der sociale Sprachgebrauch nicht auch sein 
Zopf haben? — which we may render — " As long as snobism 
runs in the blood, why should it not run in our speech ?" As 
a necessary preliminary to a purely rational society, you must 
obtain purely rational men, free from the sweet and bitter prej- 
udices of hereditary affection and antipathy ; which is as easy 
as to get running streams without springs, or the leafy shade 
of the forest without the secular growth of trunk and branch. 

The historical conditions of society may be compared with 
those o-f language. It must be admitted that the language of 
cultivated nations is in anything but a rational state ; the great 
sections of the civilized world are only approximative^ intelli- 
gible to each other, and even that only at the cost of long 
study ; one word stands for many things, and many words for 
one thing ; the subtle shades of meaning, and still subtler 
echoes of association, make language an instrument which 
scarcely anything short of genius can wield with definiteness 
and certainty. Suppose, then, that the effect which has been 
again and again made to construct a universal language on a 
rational basis has at length succeeded, and that you have a 
language which has no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no 
cumbrous forms, no fitful simmer of many-hued significance, 

* Throughout this article in our statement of Kiehl's opinions we 
must be understood not as quoting Riehl, but as interpreting and 
illustrating him. 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN" LIFE. 165 

no hoary archaisms '■ familiar with forgotten years" — a patent 
deodorized and non-resonant language, which effects the 
purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic 
signs. Your language may be a perfect medium of expression 
to science, but will never express life, which is a great deal 
more than science. With the anomalies and inconveniences of 
historical language you will have parted with its music and its 
passions, and its vital qualities as an expression of individual 
character, with its subtle capabilities of wit, with everything 
that gives it power over the imagination ; and the next step 
in simplification will be the invention of a talking watch, which 
will achieve the utmost facility and despatch in the communica- 
tion of ideas by a graduated adjustment of ticks, to be repre- 
sented in writing by a corresponding arrangement of dots. A 
melancholy " language of the future !" The sensory and 
motor nerves that run in the same sheath are scarcely bound 
together by a more necessary and delicate union than that 
which binds men's affections, imagination, wit and humor, 
with the subtle ramifications of historical language. Language 
must be left to grow in precision, completeness, and unity, as 
minds grow in clearness, comprehensiveness, and sympathy. 
And there is an analogous relation between the moral tenden- 
cies of men and the social conditions they have inherited. 
The nature of European men has its roots intertwined with the 
past, and can only be developed by allowing those roots to re- 
main undisturbed while the process of development is going 
on until that perfect ripeness of the seed which carries with it 
a life independent of the root. This vital connection with the 
past is much more vividly felt on the Continent than in Eng- 
land, where we have to recall it by an effort of memory and 
reflection ; for though our English life is in its core intensely 
traditional, Protestantism and commerce have modernized the 
face of the land and the aspects of society in a far greater 
degree than in any continental country : 

" Abroad," says Ruskin, " a building of the eighth or tenth cen- 
tury stands ruinous in the open streets ; the children play round it, 



166 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

the peasants heap their corn in it, the buildings of yesterday nestle 
about it, and fit their new stones in its rents, and tremble in sympa- 
thy as it trembles. No one wonders at it, or thinks of it as separate, 
and of another time ; we feel the ancient world to be a real thing, 
and one with the new ; antiquity is no dream ; it is rather the chil- 
dren playing about the old stones that are the dream. But all is con- 
tinuous ; and the words ' from generation to generation' ' under- 
standable here." 

This conception of European society as incarnate history is 
the fundamental idea of Riehl's books. After the notable fail- 
ure of revolutionary attempts conducted from the point of view 
of abstract democratic and socialistic theories, after the practi- 
cal demonstration of the evils resulting from a bureaucratic sys- 
tem, which governs by an undiscriminating, dead mechanism, 
Riehl wishes to urge on the consideration of his countrymen a 
social policy founded on the special study of the people as they 
are — on the natural history of the various social ranks. He 
thinks it wise to pause a little from theorizing, and see what is 
the material actually present for theory to work upon. It is 
the glory of the Socialists — in contrast with the democratic 
doctrinaires who have been too much occupied with the general 
idea of " the people" to inquire particularly into the actual life 
of the people — that they have thrown themselves with enthu- 
siastic zeal into the study at least of one social group, namely, 
the factory operatives ; and here lies the secret of their partial 
success. But, unfortunately, they have made this special duty 
of a single fragment of society the basis of a theory which 
quietly substitutes for the small group of Parisian proletaires or 
English factory-workers the society of all Europe — nay, of the 
whole world. And in this way they have lost the best fruit of 
their investigations. For, says Riehl, the more deeply we 
penetrate into the knowledge of society in its details, the more 
thoroughly we shall be convinced that a universal social policy 
has no validity except on paper, and can never be carried into 
successful practice. The conditions of German society are 
altogether different from those of French, of English, or of 
Italian society ; and to apply the same social theory to these 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 167 

nations indiscriminately is about as wise a procedure as Trip- 
tolemus Yellowley's application of the agricultural directions 
in Virgil's " Georgics" to his farm in the Shetland Isles. 

It is the clear and strong light in which Riehl places this im- 
portant position that in our opinion constitutes the suggestive 
value of his books for foreign as well as German readers. It 
has not been sufficiently insisted on, that in the various 
branches of Social Science there is an advance from the 
general to the special, from the simple to the complex, analo- 
gous with that which is found in the series of the sciences, from 
Mathematics to Biology. To the laws of quantity comprised 
in Mathematics and Physics are superadded, in Chemistry, 
laws of quality ; to these again are added, in Biology, laws of 
life ; and lastly, the conditions of life in general branch out 
into its special conditions, or Natural History, on the one 
hand, and into its abnormal conditions, or Pathology, on the 
other. And in this series or ramification of the sciences, the 
more general science will not suffice to solve the problems of the 
more special. Chemistry embraces phenomena which are not 
explicable by Physics ; Biology embraces phenomena which are 
not explicable by Chemistry ; and no biological generalization 
will enable us to predict the infinite specialities produced by the 
complexity of vital conditions. So Social Science, while it has 
departments which in their fundamental generality correspond 
to mathematics and physics, namely, those grand and simple 
generalizations which trace out the inevitable march of the 
human race as a whole, and, as a ramification of these, the laws 
of economical science, has also, in the departments of govern- 
ment and jurisprudence, which embrace the conditions of social 
life in all their complexity, what may be called its Biology, 
carrying us on to innumerable special phenomena which outlie 
the sphere of science, and belong to Natural History. And 
just as the most thorough acquaintance with physics, or chem- 
istry, or general physiology, will not enable you at once to es- 
tablish the balance of life in your private vivarium, so that 
your particular society of zoophytes, mollusks, and echinoderms 



168 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

may feel themselves, as the Germans say, at ease in their skin ; 
so the most complete equipment of theory will not enable a 
statesman or a political and social reformer to adjust his meas- 
ures wisely, in the absence of a special acquaintance with the 
section of society for which he legislates, with the peculiar char- 
acteristics of the nation, the province, the class whose well- 
being he has to consult. In other words, a wise social policy 
must be based not simply on abstract social science, but on the 
natural history of social bodies. 

RiehPs books are not dedicated merely to the argumentative 
maintenance of this or of any other position ; they are intended 
chiefly as a contribution to that knowledge of the German peo- 
ple on the importance of which he insists. He is less occupied 
with urging his own conclusions than with impressing on his 
readers the facts which have led him to those conclusions. In 
the volume entitled li Land und Leute," which, though pub- 
lished last, is properly an introduction to the volume entitled 
" Die Biirgerliche Gesellschaft," he considers the German 
people in their physical geographical relations ; he compares 
the natural divisions of the race, as determined by land and 
climate, and social traditions, with the artificial divisions which 
are based on diplomacy ; and he traces the genesis and in- 
fluences of what we may call the ecclesiastical geography of 
Germany — its partition between Catholicism and Protestantism. 
He shows that the ordinary antithesis of North and South Ger- 
many represents no real ethnographical distinction, and that the 
natural divisions of Germany, founded on its physical geog- 
raphy are threefold — namely, the low plains, the middle moun- 
tain region, and the high mountain region, or Lower, Middle, < 
and Upper Germany ; and on this primary natural division all j 
the other broad ethnographical distinctions of Germany will be ' 
found to rest. The plains of North or Lower Germany 
include all the seaboard the nation possesses ; and this, 
together with the fact that they are traversed to the depth of 
€00 miles by navigable rivers, makes them the natural seat of 
a trading race. Quite different is the geographical character of 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 169 

Middle Germany. While the northern plains are marked off 
into great divisions, by such rivers as the Lower Rhine, the 
Weser, and the Oder, running almost in parallel lines, this cen- 
tral region is cut up like a mosaic by the capricious lines of 
valleys and rivers. Here is the region in which you find those 
famous roofs from which the rain-water runs toward two differ-* 
ent seas, and the mountain-tops from which you may look into 
eight or ten German states. The abundance of water-power 
and the presence of extensive coal-mines allow of a very diversi- 
fied industrial development in Middle Germany. In Upper Ger- 
many, or the high mountain regiou, we find the same symmetry 
in the lines of the rivers as in the north ; almost all the great 
Alpine streams flow parallel with the Danube. But the major- 
ity of these rivers are neither navigable nor available for indus- 
trial objects, and instead of serving for communication they 
shut off one great tract from another. The slow development, 
the simple peasant life of many districts is here determined by 
the mountain and the river. In the south-east, however, in- 
dustrial activity spreads through Bohemia toward Austria, and 
forms a sort of balance to the industrial districts of the Lower 
Rhine. Of course, the boundaries of these three regions can- 
not be very strictly defined ; but an approximation to the limits 
of Middle Germany may be obtained by regarding it as a tri- 
angle, of which one angle lies in Silesia, another in Aix-la- 
Chapelle, and a third at Lake Constance. 

This triple division corresponds with the broad distinctions 
of climate. In the northern plains the atmosphere is damp and 
heavy ; in the southern mountain region it is dry and rare, and 
there are abrupt changes of temperature, sharp contrasts between 
the seasons, and devastating storms ; but in both these zones 
men are hardened by conflict with the roughness of the cli- 
mate. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, there is little of 
this struggle ; the seasons are more equable, and the mild, soft 
air of the valleys tends to make the inhabitants luxurious and 
sensitive to hardships. It is only in exceptional mountain dis- 
tricts that one is here reminded of the rough, bracing air on 



170 THE ESSAYS OF 

the heights of Southern Germany. It is a curious fact that, as 
the air becomes gradually lighter and rarer from the North 
German coast toward Upper Germany, the average of suicides 
regularly decreases. Mecklenburg has the highest number, 
then Prussia, while the fewest suicides occur in Bavaria and 
Austria. 

Both the northern and southern regions have still a large 
extent of waste lands, downs, morasses, and heaths ; and to 
these are added, in the south, abundance of snow-fields and 
naked rock ; while in Middle Germany culture has almost over- 
spread the face of the land, and there are no large tracts of 
waste. There is the same proportion in the distribution of for- 
ests. Again, in the north we see a monotonous continuity of 
wheat- fields, potato- grounds, meadow-lands, and vast heaths, 
and there is the same uniformity of culture over large surfaces 
in the southern table-lands and the Alpine pastures. In Mid- 
dle Germany, on the contrary, there is a perpetual variety of 
crops within a short space ; the diversity of land surface and 
the corresponding variety in the species of plants are an invita- 
tion to the splitting up of estates, and this again encourages to 
the utmost the motley character of the cultivation. 

According to this threefold division, it appears that there 
are certain features common to North and South Germany in 
which they differ from Central Germany, and the nature of this 
difference Riehl indicates by distinguishing the former as Cen- 
tralized Land and the latter as Individualized Land ; a distinc- 
tion which is well symbolized by the fact that North and South 
Germany possess the great lines of railway which are the 
medium for the traffic of the world, while Middle Germany is 
far richer in lines for local communication, and possesses the 
greatest length of railway within the smallest space. Disre- 
garding superficialities, the East Frieslanders, the Schleswig- 
Holsteiners, the Mecklenbnrghers, and the Pomeranians are 
much more nearly allied to the old Bavarians, the Tyrolese, 
and the Styrians than any of these are allied to the Saxons, 
the Thuringians, or the Rhinelanders. Both in North and 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OE GERMAN LIFE. 171 

South Germany original races are still found in large masses, 
and popular dialects are spoken ; you still find there thoroughly 
peasant districts, thorough villages, and also, at great intervals, 
thorough cities ; you still find there a sense of rank. In Mid- 
dle Germany, on the contrary, the original races are fused 
together or sprinkled hither and thither ; the peculiarities of 
the popular dialects are worn down or confused ; there is no 
very strict line of demarkation between the country and the town 
population, hundreds of small towns and large villages being 
hardly distinguishable in their characteristics ; and the sense of 
rank, as part of the organic structure of society, is almost ex- 
tinguished. Again, both in the north and south there is still a 
strong ecclesiastical spirit in the people, and the Pomeranian 
sees Antichrist in the Pope as clearly as the Tyrol ese sees him 
in Doctor Luther ; while in Middle Germany the confessions 
are mingled, they exist peaceably side by side in very narrow 
space, and tolerance or indifference has spread itself widely 
even in the popular mind. And the analogy, or rather the 
causal relation between the physical geography of the three re- 
gions and the development of the population goes still further : 

" For," observes Kiehl, " the striking connection which has been 
pointed out between the local geological formations in Germany and 
the revolutionary disposition of the people has more than a meta- 
phorical significance. Where the primeval physical revolutions of 
the globe have been the wildest in their effcts, and the most multi- 
form strata have been tossed together or thrown oDe upon the other, 
it is a very intelligible consequence that on a land surface thus bro- 
ken up, the population should sooner develop itself into small com- 
munities, and that the more intense life generated in these smaller 
communities should become the most favorable nidus for the recep- 
tion of modern culture, and with this a susceptibility for its revolu- 
tionary ideas ; while a people settled in a region where its groups are 
spread over a large space will persist much more obstinately in the 
retention of its original character. The people of Middle Germany 
have none of that exclusive one-sidedness which determines the 
peculiar genius of great national groups, just as this one-sidedness 
or uniformity is wanting to the geological and geographical character 
of their land." 



172 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

This ethnographical outline Riehl fills up with special and 
typical descriptions, and then makes it the starting-point for a 
criticism of the actual political condition of Germany. The 
volume is full of vivid pictures, as well as penetrating glances 
into the maladies and tendencies of modern society. It would 
be fascinating as literature if it were not important for its facts 
and philosophy. But we can only commend it to our readers, 
and pass on to the volume entitled " Die Burgerliche Gesell- 
schaft," from which we have drawn our sketch of the German 
peasantry. Here Riehl gives us a series of studies in that nat- 
ural history of the people which he regards as the proper basis 
of social policy. He holds that, in European society, there 
are three natural ranks or estates : the hereditary landed aris- 
tocracy, the citizens or commercial class, and the peasantry or 
agricultural class. By natural ranks he means ranks which 
have their roots deep in the historical structure of society, and 
are still, in the present, showing vitality above ground ; he 
means those great social groups which are not only distin- 
guished externally by their vocation, but essentially by their 
mental character, their habits, their mode of life — by the prin- 
ciple they represent in the historical development of society. 
In his conception of the " Fourth Estate" he differs from the 
usual interpretation, according to which it is simply equivalent 
to the Proletariat, or those who are dependent on daily 
wages, whose only capital is their skill or bodily strength — 
factory operatives, artisans, agricultural laborers, to whom 
might be added, especially in Germany, the day-laborers with 
the quill, the literary proletariat. This, Riehl observes, is a 
valid basis of economical classification, but not of social 
classification. In his view, the Fourth Estate is a stratum pro- 
duced by the perpetual abrasion of the other great social 
groups ; it is the sign and result of the decomposition which is 
commencing in the organic constitution of society. Its ele- 
ments are derived alike from the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, 
and the peasantry. It assembles under its banner the desert- 
ers of historical society, and forms them into a terrible army, 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 173 

which is only just awaking to the consciousness of its corporate 
power. The tendency of this Fourth Estate, by the very 
process of its formation, is to do away with the distinctive his- 
torical character of the other estates, and to resolve their pecul- 
iar rank and vocation into a uniform social relation founded on 
an abstract conception of society. According to Riehl's classi- 
fication, the day-laborers, whom the political economist desig- 
nates as the Fourth Estate, belong partly to the peasantry or 
agricultural class, and partly to the citizens or commercial 
class. 

Riehl considers, in the first place, the peasantry and aristoc- 
racy as the " Forces of social persistence," and, in the second, 
the bourgeoisie and the " Fourth Estate" as the "Forces of 
social movement." 

The aristocracy, he observes, is the only one among these 
four groups which is denied by others besides Socialists to have 
any natural basis as a separate rank. It is admitted that there 
was once an aristocracy which had an intrinsic ground of exist- 
ence, but now, it is alleged, this is an historical fossil, an anti- 
quarian relic, venerable because gray with age. It what, it is 
asked, can consist the peculiar vocation of the aristocracy, 
since it has no longer the monopoly of the land, of the higher 
military functions, and of government offices, and since the 
service of the court has no longer any political importance ? 
To this Riehl replies, that in great revolutionary crises, the 
M men of progress" have more than once '* abolished " the 
aristocracy. But, remarkably enough, the aristocracy has 
always reappeared. This measure of abolition showed that 
the nobility were no longer regarded as a real class, for to abol- 
ish a real class would be an absurdity. It is quite possible to 
contemplate a voluntary breaking up of the peasant or citizen 
class in the socialistic sense, but no man in his senses would 
think of straightway " abolishing" citizens and peasants. The 
aristocracy, then, was regarded as a sort of cancer, or excres- 
cence of society. Nevertheless, not only has it been found im- 
possible to annihilate an hereditary nobility by decree, but 



174 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

also the aristocracy of the eighteenth century outlived even 
the self-destructive acts of its own perversity. A life which 
was entirely without object, entirely destitute of functions, 
would not, says Riehl, be so persistent. He has an acute criti- 
cism of those who conduct a polemic against the idea of an 
hereditary aristocracy while they are proposing an " aristocracy 
of talent," w 7 hich after all is based on the principle of inheri- 
tance. The Socialists are, therefore, only consistent in declar- 
ing against an aristocracy of talent. " But when they have 
turned the world into a great Foundling Hospital they will still 
be unable to eradicate the ' privileges of birth.' " We must 
not follow him in his criticism, however ; nor can we afford to 
do more than mention hastily his interesting sketch of the 
mediaeval aristocrac} r , and his admonition to the German aris- 
tocracy of the present day, that the vitality of their class is not 
to be sustained by romantic attempts to revive medieval forms 
and sentiments, but only by the exercise of functions as real 
and salutary for actual society as those of the mediaeval aristoc- 
racy were for the feudal age. " In modern society the divi- 
sions of rank indicate division of labor, according to that dis- 
tribution of functions in the social organism which the histori- 
cal constitution of society has determined. In this way the 
principle of differentiation and the principle of unity are iden- 
tical." 

The elaborate study of the German bourgeoisie, which forms 
the next division of the volume, must be passed over, but we 
may pause a moment to note Riehl' s definition of the social 
Philister (Philistine), an epithet for which we have no equiva- 
lent, not at all, however, for want of the object it represents. 
Most people who read a little German know that the epithet 
Philister originated in the Burschen-leben, or Student-life of 
Germany, and that the antithesis of Bursch and Philister was 
equivalent to the antithesis of " gown" and "town;" but 
since the word has passed into ordinary language it has as- 
sumed several shades of significance which have not yet been 
merged into a single, absolute meaning ; and one of the ques- 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 175 

tions which an English visitor in Germany will probably take an 
opportunity of asking is, ' ' What is the strict meaning of the 
word Philister V Riehl's answer is, that the Philister " is one 
who is indifferent to all social interests, all public life, as dis- 
tinguished from selfish and private interests ; he has no sym- 
pathy with political and social events except as they affect his 
own comfort and prosperity, as they offer him material for 
amusement or opportunity for gratifying his vanity. He 
has no social or political creed, but is always of the opin- 
ion which is most convenient for the moment. He is 
always in the majority, and is the main element of unreason 
and stupidity in the judgment of a " discerning public." It 
seems presumptuous in us to dispute Riehl's interpretation of a 
German word, but we must think that, in literature, the epithet 
Philister has usually a wider meaning than this — includes his 
definition and something more. We imagine the Philister is 
the personification of the spirit which judges everything from 
a lower point of view than the subject demands ; which judges 
the affairs of the parish from the egotistic or purely personal 
point of view ; which judges the affairs of the nation from the 
parochial point of view, and does not hesitate to measure the 
merits of the universe from the human point of view. At least 
this must surely be the spirit to which Goethe alludes in a pas- 
sage cited by Riehl himself, where he says that the Germans 
need not be ashamed of erecting a monument to him as well as 
to Blucher ; for if Blucher had freed them from the French, he 
(Goethe) had freed them from the nets of the Philister : 

" Ihr mogt mirininier ungesclieut 
Gleich Bluchern Denkmal setzen ! 
Von Franzosen hat er euch befreit, 
Ich. von Philister-netzen. " 

Goethe could hardly claim to be the apostle of public spirit ; 
but he is eminently the man who helps us to rise to a lofty 
point of observation, so that we may see things in their rela- 
tive proportions. 

The most interesting chapters in the description of the 



176 THE ESSAYS OF 

" Fourth Estate," which concludes the volume, are those on 
the '* Aristocratic Proletariat" and the " Intellectual Proleta- 
riat." The Fourth Estate in Germany, says Riehl, has its 
centre of gravity not, as in England and France, in the day 
laborers and factory operatives, and still less in the degenerate 
peasantry. In Germany the educated proletariat is the leaven 
that sets the mass in fermentation ; the dangerous classes there 
go about, not in blouses, but in frock coats ; they begin with 
the impoverished prince and end in the hungriest litterateur. 
The custom that all the sons of a nobleman shall inherit their 
father's title necessarily goes on multiplying that class of aris- 
tocrats who are not only without function but without adequate 
provision, and w r ho shrink from entering the ranks of the citi- 
zens by adopting some honest calling. The younger son of a 
prince, says Riehl, is usually obliged to remain without any 
vocation ; and however zealously he may study music, paint- 
ing, literature, or science, he can never be a regular musician, 
painter, or man of science ; his pursuit will be called a " pas- 
sion," not a " calling," and to the end of his days he remains 
a dilettante. " But the ardent pursuit of a fixed practical call- 
ing can alone satisfy the active man." Direct legislation can- 
not remedy this evil. The inheritance of titles by younger 
sons is the universal custom, and custom is stronger than law. 
But if all government preference for the " aristocratic proleta- 
riat" were withdrawn, the sensible men among them would 
prefer emigration, or the pursuit of some profession, to the 
hungry distinction of a title without rents. 

The intellectual proletaires Riehl calls the " church militant" 
of the Fourth Estate in Germany. In no other country are 
they so numerous ; in no other country is the trade in material 
and industrial capital so far exceeded by the wholesale and 
retail trade, the traffic and the usury, in the intellectual capital 
of the nation. Germany yields more intellectual vroduce than it 
can use and pay for. 

" This over-production, which is not transient but permanent, nay, 
is constantly on the increase, evidences a diseased state of the na- 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 177 

tional industry, a perverted application of industrial powers, and is a 
far more pungent satire on the national condition than all the pov- 
erty of operatives and peasants. . . . Other nations need not 
envy us the preponderance of the intellectual proletariat over the 
proletaires of manual labor. For man more easily becomes diseased 
from over-study than from the labor of the hands , and it is precisely 
in the intellectual proletariat that there are the most dangerous seeds 
of disease. This is the group in which the opposition between 
earnings and wants, between the ideal social position and the real, is 
the most hopelessly irreconcilable." 

We must unwillingly leave our readers to make acquaintance 
for themselves with the graphic details with which Riehl fol- 
lows up this general statement ; but before quitting these ad- 
mirable volumes, let us say, lest our inevitable omissions should 
have left room for a different conclusion, that Riehl's conserva- 
tism is not in the least tinged with the partisanship of a class, 
with a poetic fanaticism for the past, or with the prejudice of 
a mind incapable of discerning the grander evolution of things 
to which all social forms are but temporarily subservient. It 
is the conservatism of a clear-eyed, practical, but withal large- 
minded man — a little caustic, perhaps, now and then in his epi- 
grams on democratic doctrinaires who have their nostrum for 
all political and social diseases, and on communistic theories 
which he regards as " the despair of the individual in his own 
manhood, reduced to a system/' but nevertheless able and will- 
ing to do justice to the elements of fact and reason in every 
shade of opinion and every form of effort. He is as far as 
possible from the folly of supposing that the sun will go back- 
ward on the dial because we put the hands of our clock back- 
ward ; he only contends against the opposite folly of decreeing 
that it shall be mid-day while in fact the sun is only just 
touching the mountain-tops, and all along the valley men are 
stumbling in the twilight. 



VI. 

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with, many 
species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that 
predominates in them — the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the 
pedantic. But it is a mixture of all these — a composite order 
of feminine fatuity — that produces the largest class of such 
novels, which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery 
species. The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress 
in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable 
duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers 
in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in 
the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly 
indicated beyond. Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling ; 
her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to 
irregularity ; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect ; 
she is perfectly well dressed and perfectly religious ; she dances 
like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. Or 
it may be that the heroine is not an heiress — that rank and 
wealth are the only things in which she is deficient ; but she 
infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing 
many matches and securing the best, and she wears some 
family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the 
end. Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion 
at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs, 
which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhet- 
oric ; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make 
speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to 
her bedroom. In her recorded conversations she is amazingly 



SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 179 

eloquent, and id her unrecorded conversations amazingly witty. 
She is understood to have a depth of insight that looks through 
and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her 
superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to 
set their clocks and watches, and all will go well. The men 
play a very subordinate part by her side. You are consoled 
now and then by a hint that they have affairs, which keeps you 
in mind that the working-day business of the world is somehow 
being carried on, but ostensibly the final cause of their existence 
is that they may accompany the heroine on her " starring" 
expedition through life. They see her at a ball, and they are 
dazzled ; at a flower-show, and they are fascinated ; on a 
riding excursion, and they are witched by her noble horseman- 
ship ; at church, and they are awed by the sweet solemnity of 
her demeanor. She is the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, 
and flounces. For all this she as often as not marries the 
wrong person to begin with, and she suffers terribly from the 
plots and intrigues of the vicious baronet ; but even death has 
a soft place in his heart for such a paragon, and remedies all 
mistakes for her just at the right moment. The vicious 
baronet is sure to be killed in a duel, and the tedious husband 
dies in his bed requesting his wife, as a particular favor to him, 
to marry the man she loves best, and having already dis- 
patched a note to the lover informing him of the comfortable 
arrangement. Before matters arrive at this desirable issue 
our feelings are tried by seeing the noble, lovely, and gifted 
heroine pass through many mauvais moments, but we have the 
satisfaction of knowing that her sorrows are wept into em- 
broidered pocket-handkerchiefs, that her fainting form reclines 
on the very best upholstery, and that whatever vicissitudes she 
may undergo, from being dashed out of her carriage to having 
her head shaved in a fever, she comes out of them all with a 
complexion more blooming and locks more redundant than 
ever. 

We may remark, by the way, that we have been relieved 
from a serious scruple by discovering that silly novels by lady 



180 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

novelists rarely introduce us into any other than very lofty and 
fashionable society. We had imagined that destitute women 
turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had 
no other " ladylike" means of getting their bread. On this 
supposition, vacillating syntax, and improbable incident had a 
certain pathos for us, like the extremely supererogatory pin- 
cushions and ill-devised nightcaps that are offered for sale by a 
blind man. We felt the commodity to be a nuisance, but we 
were glad to think that the money went to relieve the neces- 
sitous, and we pictured to ourselves lonely women struggling 
for a maintenance, or wives and daughters devoting them- 
selves to the production of " copy" out of pure heroism — per- 
haps to pay their husband's debts or to purchase luxuries for a 
sick father. Under these impressions we shrank from criticis- 
ing a lady's novel : her English might be faulty, but we said to 
ourselves her motives are irreproachable ; her imagination may 
be uninventive, but her patience is untiring. Empty writing 
was excused by an empty stomach, and twaddle was consecrated 
by tears. But no ! This theory of ours, like many other 
pretty theories, has had to give way before observation. 
Women's silly novels, we are now convinced, are written 
under totally different circumstances. The fair writers have 
evidently never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage 
window ; they have no notion of the working-classes except as 
" dependents ;" they think five hundred a year a miserable 
pittance ; Belgravia and " baronial halls" are their primary 
truths ; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man 
who is not at least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime 
minister. It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with 
violet-colored ink and a ruby pen ; that they must be entirely 
indifferent to publishers' accounts, and inexperienced in every 
form of poverty except poverty of brains. It is true that we 
are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their 
representations of the high society in which they seem to live ; 
but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other 
form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their 



SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 181 

literary men, tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible ; and 
their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of re- 
producing both what they have seen and heard, and what they 
have not seen and heard, with equal unfaithfulness. 

There are few women, we suppose, who have not seen some- 
thing of children under five years of age, yet in "Compen- 
sation," a recent novel of the mind-and-millinery species, 
which calls itself a " story of real life," we have a child of 
four and a half years old talking in this Ossianic fashion : 

" ■ Oh, I am so happy, clear gran' mamma ;— I have seen — I have 
seen such a delightful person ; he is like everything beautiful — like 
the smell of sweet flowers, and the view from Ben Lemond ; — or no, 
better than thai—he is like what I think of and see when I am very, 
very happy ; and he is really like mamma, too, when she sings ; and 
his forehead is like that distant sea,' she continued, pointing to the 
blue Mediterranean ; ' there seems no end — no end ; or like the 
clusters of stars I like best to look at on a warm fine night. . . . 
Don't look so . . . your forehead is like Loch Lomond, when the 
wind is blowing and the sun is gone in ; I like the sunshine best 
when the lake is smooth. ... So now— I like it better than 
ever . . . It is more beautiful still from the dark cloud that has 
gone over it, when the sun suddenly lights up all the colors of the fo7*ests 
and shining purple rocks, and it is all reflected in the waters below. ' " 

We are not surprised to learn that the mother of this infant 
phenomenon, who exhibits symptoms so alarmingly like those 
of adolescence repressed by gin, is herself a phoenix. We are 
assured, again and again, that she had a remarkably original in 
mind, that she was a genius, and " conscious of her original- 
ity," and she was fortunate enough to have a lover who was 
also a genius and a man of " most original mind." 

This lover, we read, though " wonderfully similar" to her 
" in powers and capacity," was " infinitely superior to her in 
faith and development," and she saw in him " ' Agape ' — so 
rare to find — of which she had read and admired the meaning 
in her Greek Testament ; having, from her great facility in 
learning languages, read the Scriptures in their original 
tongues. ' ' Of course ! Greek and Hebrew are mere play to 



182 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

a heroine ; Sanscrit is no more than a b c to her ; and she can 
talk with perfect correctness in any language, except English. 
She is a polking polyglot, a Creuzer in crinoline. Poor men ! 
There are so few of you who know even Hebrew ; you think 
it something to boast of if, like Bolingbroke, you only " under- 
stand that sort of learning and what is writ about it ;" and you 
are perhaps adoring women who can think slightingly of you 
m all the Semitic languages successively. But, then, as we are 
almost invariably told that a heroine has a " beautifully small 
head," and as her intellect has probably been early invigorated 
by an attention to costume and deportment, we may conclude 
that she can pick up the Oriental tongues, to say nothing of 
their dialects, with the same aerial facility that the butterfly 
sips nectar. Besides, there can be no difficulty in conceiving 
the depth of the heroine's erudition when that of the authoress 
is so evident. 

In " Laura Gay," another novel of the same school, the 
heroine seems less at home in Greek and Hebrew but she 
makes up for the deficiency by a quite playful familiarity with 
the Latin classics — with the " dear old Virgil," " the graceful 
Horace, the humane Cicero, and the pleasant Livy ;" indeed, 
it is such a matter of course with her to quote Latin that she 
does it at a picnic in a very mixed company of ladies and gentle- 
men, having, we are told, " no conception that the nobler sex 
were capable of jealousy on this subject. And if, indeed," con- 
tinues the biographer of Laura Gay, " the wisest and noblest 
portion of that sex were in the majority, no such sentiment 
would exist ; but while Miss Wyndhams and Mr. Redfords 
abound, great sacrifices must be made to their existence." 
Such sacrifices, we presume, as abstaining from Latin quota- 
tions, of extremely moderate interest and applicability, which 
the wise and noble minority of the other sex would be quite as 
willing to dispense with as the foolish and ignoble majority. 
It is as little the custom of well-bred men as of well-bred 
women to quote Latin in mixed parties ; they can contain their 
familiarity with " the humane Cicero" without allowing it 



SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 183 

to boil over in ordinary conversation, and even references to 
" the pleasant Livy" are not absolutely irrepressible. But 
Ciceronian Latin is the mildest form of Miss Gay's conversa- 
tional power. Being on the Palatine with a party of sight- 
seers, she falls into the following vein of well-rounded remark : 
" Truth can only be pure objectively, for even in the creeds 
where it predominates, being subjective, and parcelled out into 
portions, each of these necessarily receives a hue of idiosyn- 
crasy, that is, a taint of superstition more or less strong ; while 
in such creeds as the Roman Catholic, ignorance, interest, the 
basis of ancient idolatries, and the force of authority, have 
gradually accumulated on the pure truth, and transformed it, 
at last, into a mass of superstition for the majority of its 
votaries ; and how few are there, alas ! whose zeal, courage, 
and intellectual energy are equal to the analysis of this ac- 
cumulation, and to the discovery of the pearl of great price 
which lies hidden beneath this heap of rubbish." We have 
often met with women much more novel and profound in their 
observations than Laura Gay, but rarely with any so inoppor- 
tunely long-winded. A clerical lord, who is half in love with 
her, is alarmed by the daring remarks just quoted, and begins 
to suspect that she is inclined to free-thinking. But he is 
mistaken ; when in a moment of sorrow he delicately begs leave 
to " recall to her memory, a depot of strength and consolation 
under affliction, which, until we are hard pressed by the trials 
of life, we are too apt to forget," we iearn that she really has 
11 recurrence to that sacred depot," together with the tea-pot. 
There is a certain flavor of orthodoxy mixed with the parade 
of fortunes and line carriages in " Laura Gay," but it is an 
orthodoxy mitigated by study of " the humane Cicero," and 
by an " intellectual disposition to analyze." 

" Compensation" is much more heavily dosed with doctrine, 
but then it has a treble amount of snobbish worldliness and 
absurd incident to tickle the palate of pious frivolity. Linda, 
the heroine, is still more speculative and spiritual than Laura 
Gay, but she has been " presented," and has more and far 



184 



grander lovers ; very wicked and fascinating women are intro- 
duced — even a French honne ; and no expense is spared to get 
up as exciting a story as you will find in the most immoral 
novels. In fact, it is a wonderful pot pourri of Almack's, 
Scotch second- sight, Mr. Rogers's breakfasts, Italian brigands, 
death-bed conversions, superior authoresses, Italian mistresses, 
and attempts at poisoning old ladies, the whole served up with 
a garnish of talk about " faith and development" and " most 
original minds." Even Miss Susan Barton, the superior au- 
thoress, whose pen moves in a ' ' quick, decided manner when 
she is composing," declines the finest opportunities of mar- 
riage ; and though old enough to be Linda's mother (since we 
are told that she refused Linda's father), has her hand sought 
by a young earl, the heroine's rejected lover. Of course, 
genius and morality must be backed by eligible offers, or they 
would seem rather a dull affair ; and piety, like other things, 
in order to be comme il fant, must be in " society," and have 
admittance to the best circles. 

" Rank and Beauty" is a more frothy and less religious 
variety of the mind-and-millinery species. The heroine, we 
are told, " if she inherited her father's pride of birth and her 
mother's beauty of person, had in herself a tone of enthusiastic 
feeling that, perhaps, belongs to her age even in the lowly 
born, but which is refined into the high spirit of wild romance 
only in the far descended, who feel that it is their best inheri- 
tance." This enthusiastic young lady, by dint of reading the 
newspaper to her father, fails in love with the prime minister, 
who, through the medium of leading articles and 4t the resume 
of the debates," shines upon her imagination as a bright 
particular star, which has no parallax for her living in the 
country as simple Miss Wyndham. But she forthwith becomes 
Baroness Umfraviile in her own right, astonishes the world 
with her beauty and accomplishments when she bursts upon it 
from her mansion in Spring Gardens, and, as you foresee, will 
presently come into contact with the unseen objet aim'e. Per- 
haps the words ' ' prime minister' ' suggest to you a wrinkled or 



SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 185 

obese sexagenarian ; but pray dismiss the image. Lord Rupert 
Conway has been k ' called while still almost a youth to the 
first situation which a subject can hold in the universe," and 
even leading articles and a resume of the debates have not 
conjured up a dream that surpasses the fact. 

" The door opened again, and Lord Rupert Conway entered. 
Evelyn gave one glance. It was enough ; she was not disappointed. 
It seemed as if a picture on which she had long gazed was suddenly 
instinct with life, and had stepped from its frame before her. His 
tall figure, the distinguished simplicity of his air— it was a living 
Vandyke, a cavalier, one of his noble cavalier ancestors, or one to 
whom her fancy had always likened him, who long of yore had with 
an Umfraville fought the Paynim far beyond the sea. Was this 
reality ? ' ' 

Very little like it, certainly, 

By and by it becomes evident that the ministerial heart is 
touched. Lady Umfraville is on a visit to the Queen at 
Windsor, and — 

" The last evening of her stay, when they returned from riding, 
Mr. Wyndham took her and a large party to the top of the Keep, to 
see the view. She was leaning on the battlements, gazing from that 
' stately height ' at the prospect beneath her, when Lord Rupert was 
by her side. ' What an unrivalled view ! ' exclaimed she. 

" * Yes, it would have been wrong to go without having been up 
here. You are pleased with your visit ? ' 

" ' Enchanted ! A Queen to live and die under, to live and die 
for!' 

" ' Ha !' cried he, with sudden emotion, and with a eureka expres- 
sion of countenance, as if he had indeed found a heart in unison with 
his own.' " 

The " eureka expression of countenance' ' you see at once 
to be prophetic of marriage at the end of the third volume ; 
but before that desirable consummation there are very com- 
plicated misunderstandings, arising chiefly from the vindictive 
plotting of Sir Luttrel Wycherley, who is a genius, a poet, and in 
every way a most remarkable character indeed. He is not only 
a romantic poet, but a hardened rake and a cynical wit ; yet 



186 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

his deep passion for Lady Umfraville has so impoverished his 
epigrammatic talent that he cuts an extremely poor figure in 
conversation. When she rejects him, he rushes into the 
shrubbery and rolls himself in the dirt ; and on recovering, 
devotes himself to the most diabolical and laborious schemes of 
vengeance, in the course of which he disguises himself as a 
quack physician and enters into general practice, foreseeing that 
Evelyn will fall ill, and that he shall be called in to attend her. 
At last, when all his schemes are frustrated, he takes leave of 
her in a long letter, written, as you will perceive from the fol- 
lowing passage, entirely in the style of an eminent literary man : 

" Oh, lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure, will you ever cast 
one thought upon the miserable being who addresses you ? 
Will you ever, as your gilded galley is floating down the un- 
ruffled stream of prosperity, will you ever, while lulled by the 
sweetest music — thine own praises — hear the far-off sigh from 
that world to which I am going V 

On the whole, however, frothy as it is, we rather prefer 
u Rank and Beauty" to the two other novels we have men- 
tioned. The dialogue is more natural and spirited ; there is 
some frank ignorance and no pedantry ; and you are allowed 
to take the heroine's astounding intellect upon trust, without 
being called on to read her conversational refutations of sceptics 
and philosophers, or her rhetorical solutions of the mysteries 
of the universe. 

Writers of the mind-and-millinery school are remarkably 
unanimous in their choice of diction. In their novels there is 
usually a lady or gentleman who is more or less of a upas 
tree ; the lover has a manly breast ; minds are redolent of 
various things ; hearts are hollow ; events are utilized ; friends 
are consigned to the tomb ; infancy is an engaging period ; 
the sun is a luminary that goes to his western couch, or gathers 
the rain-drops into his refulgent bosom ; life is a melancholy 
boon ; Albion and Scotia are conversational epithets. There 
is a striking resemblance, too, in the character of their moral 
comments, such, for instance, as that " It is a fact, no less true 



SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 187 

than melancholy, that all people, more or less, richer or poorer, 
are swayed by bad example ;" that " Books, however trivial, 
contain some subjects from which useful information may be 
drawn ;" that " Vice can too often borrow the language of 
virtue ;" that " Merit and nobility of nature must exist, to be 
accepted, for clamor and pretension cannot impose upon those 
too well read in human nature to be easily deceived ;" and 
that " In order to forgive, we must have been injured." 
There is doubtless a class of readers to wdiom these remarks 
appear peculiarly pointed and pungent ; for we often find them 
doubly and trebly scored with the pencil, and delicate hands 
giving in their determined adhesion to these hardy novelties by a 
distinct tres vrai, emphasized by many notes of exclamation. 
The colloquial style of these novels is often marked by much in- 
genious inversion, and a careful avoidance of such cheap phrase- 
ology as can be heard every day. Angry young gentlemen ex- 
claim, " 'Tis ever thus, methinks ;" and in the half hour before 
dinner a young lady informs her next neighbor that the first day 
she read Shakespeare she " stole away into the park, and beneath 
the shadow of the greenwood tree, devoured with rapture the 
inspired page of the great magician." But the most remark- 
able efforts of the mind-and-millinery writers lie in their 
philosophic reflections. The authoress of " Laura Gay," for 
example, having married her hero and heroine, improves the 
event by observing that " if those sceptics, whose eyes have so 
long gazed on matter that they can no longer see aught else in 
man, could once enter with heart and soul, into such bliss as 
this, they would come to say that the soul of man and the 
polypus are not of common origin, or of the same texture." 
Lady novelists, it appears, can see something else besides 
matter ; they are not limited to phenomena, but can relieve 
their eyesight by occasional glimpses of the nomnenon, and 
are, therefore, naturally better able than any one else to con- 
found sceptics, even of that remarkable but to us unknown 
school which maintains that the soul of man is of the same 
texture as the polypus. 



188 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

The most pitiable of all silly novels by lady novelists are 
what we may call the oracular species — novels intended to 
expound the writer's religious, philosophical, or moral the- 
ories. There seems to be a notion abroad among women, 
rather akin to the superstition that the speech and actions of 
idiots are inspired, and that the human being most entirely 
exhausted of common-sense is the fittest vehicle of revelation. 
To judge from their writings, there are certain ladies who 
think that an amazing ignorance, both of science and of life, is 
the best possible qualification for forming an opinion on the 
knottiest moral and speculative questions. Apparently, their 
recipe for solving all such difficulties is something like this : 
Take a woman's head, stuff it with a smattering of philosophy 
and literature chopped small, and with false notions of society 
baked hard, let it hang over a desk a few hours every day, 
and serve up hot in feeble English when not required. You 
will rarely meet with a lady novelist of the oracular class who 
is diffident of her ability to decide on theological questions — 
who has any suspicion that she is not capable of discriminating 
with the nicest accuracy between the good and evil in all 
church parties — who does not see precisely how it is that men 
have gone wrong hitherto — and pity philosophers in general 
that they have not had the opportunity of consulting her. 
Great writers, who have modestly contented themselves with 
putting their experience into fiction, and have thought it quite 
a sufficient task to exhibit men and things as they are, she 
sighs over as deplorably deficient in the application of their 
powers. " They have solved no great questions" — and she is 
ready to remedy their omission by setting before you a com- 
plete theory of life and manual of divinity in a love story, 
where ladies and gentlemen of good family go through genteel 
vicissitudes, to the utter confusion of Deists, Puseyites, and 
ultra-Protestants, and to the perfect establishment of that 
peculiar view of Christianity which either condenses itself into 
a sentence of small caps, or explodes into a cluster of stars on 
the three hundred and thirtieth page. It is true, the ladies and 



SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 189 

gentlemen will probably seem to you remarkably lutle like any 
you have had the fortune or misfortune to meth with, for, as a 
general rule, the ability of a lady novelist to describe actual 
life and her fellow-men is in inverse proportion to her con- 
fident eloquence about God and the other w r\d, and the means 
by which she usually chooses to conduct you to true ideas of 
the invisible is a totally false picture of the visible. 

As typical a novel of the oracular kind as we can hope to 
meet with, is " The Enigma : a Leaf from the Chronicles of 
the Wolchorley House." The " enigma" which this novel is 
to solve is certainly one that demands powers no less gigantic 
than those of a lady novelist, being neither more nor less than 
the existence of evil. The problem is stated and the answer 
dimly foreshadowed on the very first page. The spirited 
young lady, with raven hair, says, " All life is an inextricable 
confusion ;" and the meek young lady, with auburn hair, 
looks at the picture of the Madonna which she is copying, 
an d — " There seemed the solution of that mighty enigma. " 
The style of this novel is quite as lofty as its purpose ; indeed, 
some passages on which we have spent much patient study are 
quite beyond our reach, in spite of the illustrative aid of italics 
and small caps ; and we must await further " development" in 
order to understand them. Of Ernest, the model young 
clergyman, who sets every one right on all occasions, we read 
that " he held not of marriage in the marketable kind, after a 
social desecration ;" that, on one eventful night, " sleep had 
not visited his divided heart, where tumultuated, in varied type 
and combination, the aggregate feelings of grief and joy ;" 
and that, " for the marketable human article he had no tolera- 
tion, be it of what sort, or set for what value it might, whether 
for worship or class, his upright soul abhorred it, whose ulti- 
matum, the self -deceiver, was to him the great spiritual lie f 
4 living in a vain show, deceiving and being deceived ; ' since 
he did not suppose the phylactery and enlarged border on the 
garment to be merely a social trick." (The italics and small 
caps are the author's, and we hope they assist the reader's 



190 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

comprehension.) Of Sir Lionel, the model old gentleman, we 
are told that " the simple ideal of the middle age, apart from 
its anarchy and decadence, in him most truly seemed to live 
again, when the ties which knit men together were of heroic 
cast. The first-born colors of pristine faith and truth engraven 
on the common soul of man, and blent into the wide arch 
of brotherhood, where the primaeval law of order grew and 
multiplied each perfect after his kind, and mutually inter- 
dependent." You see clearly, of course, how colors are first 
engraven on the soul, and then blent into a wide arch, on 
which arch of colors — apparently a rainbow — the law of order 
grew and multiplied, each — apparently the arch and the law — 
perfect after his kind ? If, after this, you can possibly want 
any further aid toward knowing what Sir Lionel was, we can 
tell you that in his soul " the scientific combinations of 
thought could educe no fuller harmonies of the good and the 
true than lay in the primaeval pulses which floated as an 
atmosphere around it 1" and that, when he was sealing a 
letter, " Lo ! the responsive throb in that good man's bosom 
echoed back in simple truth the honest witness of a heart 
that condemned him not, as his eye, bedewed with love, 
rested, too, with something of ancestral pride, on the un- 
dimmed motto of the family — " Loiaute.' " 

The slightest matters have their vulgarity fumigated out of 
them by the same elevated style. Commonplace people 
would say that a copy of Shakespeare lay on a drawing-room 
table ; but the authoress of " The Enigma," bent on edifying 
periphrasis, tells you that there lay on the table, " that fund 
of human thought and feeling, which teaches the heart 
through the little name, 'Shakespeare.'" A watchman sees 
a light burning in an upper window rather longer than usual, 
and thinks that people are foolish to sit up late when they 
have an opportunity of going to bed ; but, lest this fact should 
seem too low and common, it is presented to us in the follow- 
ing striking and metaphysical manner : "He marvelled — as a 
man will think for others in a necessarily separate personality, 



SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 191 

consequently (though disallowing it) in false mental premise 
— how differently he should act, how gladly he should prize the 
rest so lightly held of within." A footman — an ordinary 
Jeames, with large calves and aspirated vowels — answers the 
door-bell, and the opportunity is seized to tell you that he was 
a " type of the large class of pampered menials, who follow 
the curse of Cain — l vagabonds ' on the face of the earth, and 
whose estimate of the human class varies in the graduated scale 
of money and expenditure. . . . These, and such as these, O 
England, be the false lights of thy morbid civilization !" We 
have heard of various " false lights," from Dr. dimming to 
Robert Owen, from Dr. Pusey to the Spirit-rappers, but we 
never before heard of the false light that emanates from plush 
and powder. 

In the same way very ordinary events of civilized life arc ex- 
alted into the most awful crises, and ladies in full skirts and 
manches d la Chinoise, conduct themselves not unlike the 
heroines of sanguinary melodramas. Mrs. Percy, a shallow 
woman of the world, wishes her son Horace to marry the 
auburn-haired Grace, she being an heiress ; but he, after the 
manner of sons, falls in love with the raven-haired Kate, the 
heiress's portionless cousin ; and, moreover, Grace herself 
shows every symptom of perfect indifference to Horace. In 
such cases sons are often sulky or fiery, mothers are alter- 
nately manoeuvring and waspish, and the portionless young lady 
often lies awake at night and cries a good deal. We are get- 
ting used to these things now, just as we are used to eclipses 
of the moon, which no longer set us howling and beating tin 
kettles. We never heard of a lady in a fashionable " front" 
behaving like Mrs. Percy under these circumstances. Hap- 
pening one day to see Horace talking to Grace at a window, 
without in the least knowing what they are talking about, or 
having the least reason to believe that Grace, who is mistress of 
the house and a person of dignity, would accept her son if he 
were to offer himself, she suddenly rushes up to them and 
clasps them both, saying, " with a flushed countenance and in 



192 THE ESSAYS OF 

an excited manner" — " This is indeed happiness ; for, may I 
not call yon so, Grace ? — my Grace — my Horace's Grace ! — my 
dear children !" Her son tells her she is mistaken, and that 
he is engaged to Kate, whereupon we have the following scene 
and tableau : 

11 Gathering herself up to an unprecedented height (!) her 
eyes lightening forth the fire of her anger : 

11 'Wretched boy !' she said, hoarsely and scornfully, and 
clenching her hand, ' Take then the doom of your own choice ! 
Bow down your miserable head and let a mother's — ' 

' ' ' Curse not ! ' spake a deep low voice from behind, and 
Mrs. Percy started, scared, as though she had seen a heavenly 
visitant appear, to break upon her in the midst of her sin. 

" Meantime Horace had fallen on his knees, at her feet, 
and hid his face in his hands. 

" Who then, is she — who ! Truly his ' guardian spirit ' 
hath stepped between him and the fearful words, which, how- 
ever unmerited, must have hung as a pall over his future exist- 
ence ; — a spell which could not be unbound — which could not 
be unsaid. 

" Of an earthly paleness, but calm with the still, iron- 
bound calmness of death — the only calm one there — Kather- 
ine stood ; and her words smote on the ear in tones whose 
appallingly slow and separate intonation rung on the heart like 
a chill, isolated tolling of some fatal knell. 

" ' He would have plighted me his faith, but I did not ac- 
cept it ; you cannot, therefore — you dare not curse him. And 
here,' she continued, raising her hand to heaven, whither her 
large dark eyes also rose with a chastened glow, which, for the 
first time, suffering had lighted in those passionate orbs — * here 
I promise, come weal, come woe, that Horace Wolchorley 
and I do never interchange vows without his mother's sanction 
— without his mother's blessing ! ' " 

Here, and throughout the story, we see that confusion of 
purpose which is so characteristic of silly novels written by 
women. It is a story of quite modern drawing-room society 



SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 193 

— a society in which polkas are plnyed and Puseyisra discuss- 
ed ; yet we have characters, and incidents, and traits of 
manner introduced, which are mere shreds from the most 
heterogeneous romances. We have a blind Irish harper, " relic 
of the picturesque bards of yore," startling us at a Sunday- 
school festival of tea and cake in an English village ; we have 
a crazy gypsy, in a scarlet cloak, singing snatches of romantic 
song, and revealing a secret on her death-bed which, with the 
testimony of a dwarfish miserly merchant, who salutes strangers 
with a curse and a devilish laugh, goes to prove that Ernest, 
the model young clergyman, is Kate's brother ; and we have 
an ultra-virtuous Irish Barney, discovering that a document is 
forged, by comparing the date of the paper with the date of 
the alleged signature, although the same document has passed 
through a court of law and occasioned a fatal decision. The 
" Hall " in which Sir Lionel lives is the venerable country-seat 
of an old family, and this, we suppose, sets the imagination of 
the authoress flying to donjons and battlements, where " lo ! 
the warder blows his horn ;" for, as the inhabitants are in 
their bedrooms on a night certainly within the recollection of 
Pleaceman X. and a breeze springs up, which we are at first 
told was faint, and then that it made the old cedars bow their 
branches to the greensward, she falls into this mediaeval vein of 
description (the italics are ours): " The banner unfurled it at 
the sound, and shook its guardian wing above, while the star- 
tled owl flapped her in the ivy ; the firmament looking down 
through her ' argus eyes ' — 

' Ministers of heaven's mute melodies.' 

And lo ! two strokes tolled from out the warder tower, and 
* Two o'clock ' re-echoed its interpreter below." 

Such stories as this of " The Enigma" remind us of the pict- 
ures clever children sometimes draw " out of their own head," 
where you will see a modern villa on the right, two knights in 
helmets fighting in the foreground, and a tiger grinning in a 
jungle on the left, the several objects being brought together 



194 



because the artist thinks each pretty, and perhaps still more 
because he remembers seeing them in other pictures. 

But we like the authoress much better on her mediaeval stilts 
than on her oracular ones — when she talks of the Ich and of 
*' subjective" and " objective," and lays down the exact line 
of Christian verity, between " right-hand excesses and left- 
hand declensions." Persons who deviate from this line arc in- 
troduced with a patronizing air of charity. Of a certain Miss 
Inshquine she informs us, with all the lucidity of italics and 
small caps, that ''''function, not form, as the inevitable outer ex- 
jwession of the spirit in this tabernacle age, weakly engrossed 
her." And d propos of Miss Mayjar, an evangelical lady who 
is a little too apt to talk of her visits to sick women and the 
state of their souls, we are told that the model clergyman is 
" not one to disallow, through the super crust, the undercur- 
rent toward good in the subject, or the positive benefits, 
nevertheless, to the object." We imagine the double-refined 
accent and protrusion of chin which are feebly represented by 
the italics in this lady's sentences ! We abstain from quoting 
any of her oracular doctrinal passages, because they refer to 
matters too serious for our pages just now. 

The epithet " silly" may seem impertinent, applied to a 
novel which indicates so much reading and intellectual activity 
as " The Enigma," but we use this epithet advisedly. If, as 
the world has long agreed, a very great amount of instruction 
will not make a wise man, still less will a very mediocre 
amount of instruction make a wise woman. And the most 
mischievous form of feminine silliness is the literary form, 
because it tends to confirm the popular prejudice against the 
more solid education of women. 

When men see girls wasting their time in consultations about 
bonnets and ball dresses, and in giggling or sentimental love- 
confidences, or middle-aged women mismanaging their chil- 
dren, and solacing themselves with acrid gossip, they can 
hardly help saying, " For Heaven's sake, let girls be better 
educated ; let them have some better objects of thought — some 



SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 195 

more solid occupations." But after a few hours' conversation 
with an oracular literary woman, or a few hours' reading of 
her books, they are likely enough to say, " After all, when a 
woman gets some knowledge, see what use she makes of it ! 
Her knowledge remains acquisition instead of passing into 
culture ; instead of being subdued into modesty and simplicity 
by a larger acquaintance with thought and fact, she has a 
feverish consciousness of her attainments ; she keeps a sort of 
mental pocket-mirror, and is continually looking in it at her 
own ' intellectuality ;' she spoils the taste of one's muffin by 
questions of metaphysics ; ' puts down ' men at a dinner-table 
with her superior information ; and seizes the opportunity of 
a soiree to catechise us on the vital question of the relation 
between mind and matter. And then, look at her writings ! 
She mistakes vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and af- 
fectation for originality ; she struts on one page, rolls her eyes 
on another, grimaces in a third, and is hysterical in a fourth. 
She may have read many writings of great men, and a few 
writings of great women ; but she is as unable to discern the 
difference between her own style and theirs as a Yorkshireman 
is to discern the difference between his own English and a 
Londoner's : rhodomontade is the native accent of her intellect. 
No — the average nature of women is too shallow and feeble a 
soil to bear much tillage ; it is only fit for the very lightest 
crops." 

It is true that the men who come to such a decision on such 
very superficial and imperfect observation may not be among 
the wisest in the world ; but we have not now to contest their 
opinion — we are only pointing out how it is unconsciously en- 
couraged by many women who have volunteered themselves as 
representatives of the feminine intellect. We do not believe 
that a man was ever strengthened in such an opinion by asso- 
ciating with a woman of true culture, whose mind had absorbed 
her knowledge instead of being absorbed by it. A really cult- 
ured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and 
the less obtrusive for her knowledge ; it has made her see her- 



19G THE ESSAYS OF 

self and her opinions in something like just proportions ; she 
does not make it a pedestal from which she natters herself that 
she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes 
it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate 
of herself. She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero on 
slight provocation ; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must 
be made to the prejudices of men, but because that mode of 
exhibiting her memory and Latin ity does not present itself to 
her as edifying or graceful. She does not write books to 
confound philosophers, perhaps because she is able to write 
books that delight them. In conversation she is the least 
formidable of women, because she understands you, without 
wanting to make you aware that you can't understand her. 
She does not give you information, which is the raw material 
of culture — she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest 
essence. 

A more numerous class of silly novels than the oracular 
(which are generally inspired by some form of High Church 
or transcendental Christianity) is what we may call the white 
neck-cloth species, which represent the tone of thought and feel- 
ing in the Evangelical party. This species is a kind of genteel 
tract on a large scale, intended as a sort of medicinal sweetmeat 
for Low Church young ladies ; an Evangelical substitute for the 
fashionable novel, as the May Meetings are a substitute for the 
Opera. Even Quaker children, one would think, can hardly 
have been denied the indulgence of a doll ; but it must be a 
doll dressed in a drab gown and a coal-scuttle-bonnet — not a 
worldly doll, in gauze and spangles. And there are no young 
ladies, we imagine — unless they belong to the Church of the 
United Brethren, in which people are married without any 
love-making — who can dispense with love stories. Thus, for 
Evangelical young ladies there are Evangelical love stories, in 
which the vicissitudes of the tender passion are sanctified by 
saving views of Regeneration and the Atonement. These 
novels differ from the oracular ones, as a Low Churchwoman 
often differs from a High Churchwoman : they are a little less 



SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 197 

supercilious and a great deal more ignorant, a little less correct 
in their syntax and a great deal more vulgar. 

The Orlando of Evangelical literature is the young curate, 
looked at from the point of view of the middle class, where 
cambric bands are understood to have as thrilling an effect on 
the hearts of young ladies as epaulettes have in the classes above 
and below it. In the ordinary type of these novels the hero 
is almost sure to be a young curate, frowned upon, perhaps by 
worldly mammas, but carrying captive the hearts of their 
daughters, who can " never forget that sermon ;" tender 
glances are seized from the pulpit stairs instead of the opera- 
box ; tete-d-tetes are seasoned with quotations from Scripture 
instead of quotations from the poets ; and questions as to the 
state of the heroine's affections are mingled with anxieties as to 
the state of her soul. The young curate always has a back- 
ground of well-dressed and wealthy if not fashionable society 
— for Evangelical silliness is as snobbish as any other kind of 
silliness — and the Evangelical lady novelist, while she explains 
to you the type of the scapegoat on one page, is ambitious on 
another to represent the manners and conversations of aristo- 
cratic people. Her pictures of fashionable society are often 
curious studies, considered as efforts of the Evangelical imag- 
ination ; but in one particular the novels of the White Neck- 
cloth School are meritoriously realistic — their favorite hero, the 
Evangelical young curate, is always rather an insipid personage. 

The most recent novel of this species that we happen to have 
before us is "The Old Grey Church." It is utterly tame 
and feeble ; there is no one set of objects on which the writer 
seems to have a stronger grasp than on any other ; and we 
should be entirely at a loss to conjecture among what phases of 
life her experience has been gained, but for certain vulgarisms 
of style which sufficiently indicate that she has had the advan- 
tage, though she has been unable to use it, of mingling chiefly 
with men and women whose manners and characters have not 
had all their bosses and angles rubbed down by refined conven- 
tionalism. It is less excusable in an Evangelical novelist than 



198 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

in any other, gratuitously to seek her subjects among titles and 
carriages. The real drama of Evangelicalism — and it has 
abundance of fine drama for any one who has genius enough to 
discern and reproduce it — lies among the middle and lower 
classes ; and are not Evangelical opinions understood to give 
an especial interest in the weak things of the earth, rather than 
in the mighty ? Why, then, cannot our Evangelical lady 
novelists show us the operation of their religious views among 
people (there really are many such in the world) who keep no 
carriage, " not so much as a brass-bound gig," who even 
manage to eat their dinner without a silver fork, and in whose 
mouths the authoress's questionable English would be strictly 
consistent ? Why can we not have pictures of religious life 
among the industrial classes in England, as interesting as Mrs. 
Stowe's pictures of religious life among the negroes ? Instead 
of this pious ladies nauseate us with novels which remind us of 
what we sometimes see in a worldly woman recently " con- 
verted ;" — she is as fond of a fine dinner-table as before, but 
she invites clergymen instead of beaux ; she thinks as much of 
her dress as before, but she adopts a more sober choice of 
colors and patterns ; her conversation is as trivial as before, but 
the triviality is flavored with gospel instead of gossip. In 
" The Old Grey Church" we have the same sort of Evangeli- 
cal travesty of the fashionable novel, and of course the vicious, 
intriguing baronet is not wanting. It is worth while to give a 
sample of the style of conversation attributed to this high-born 
rake — a style that, in its profuse italics and palpable innuen- 
does, is worthy of Miss Squeers. In an evening visit to the 
ruins of the Colosseum, Eustace, the young clergyman, has 
been withdrawing the heroine, Miss Lushington, from the rest 
of the party, for the sake of a tete-d-tete. The baronet is jeal- 
ous, and vents his pique in this way : 

" There they are, and Miss Lushington, no doubt, quite safe ; for 
she is under the holy guidance of Pope Eustace the First, who has, 
of course, been delivering to her an edifying homily on the wicked- 
ness of the heathens of yore, who, as tradition tells us, in this very 



SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 199 

place let loose the wild beastises on poor St. Paul ! — Oh, no ! by 
the bye, I believe I am wrong, and betraying my want of clergy, and 
that it was not at all St. Paul, nor was it here. But no matter, it 
would equally serve as a text to preach from, and from which to 
diverge to the degenerate heathen Christians of the present day, and 
all their naughty practices, and so end with an exhortation to ' come 
out from among them, and be separate ;' — and I am sure, Miss Lush- 
ington, you have most scrupulously conformed to that injunction this 
evening, for we have seen nothing of you since our arrival. But 
every one seems agreed it has been a charming party of pleasure, and I 
am sure we all feel much indebted to Mr. Gray for having suggested it ; 
and as he seems so capital a cicerone, I hope he will think of some- 
thing else equally agreeable to all." 

This drivelling kind of dialogue, and equally drivelling narra- 
tive, which, like a bad drawing, represents nothing, and barely 
indicates what is meant to be represented, runs through the 
book ; and we have no doubt is considered by the amiable 
authoress to constitute an improving novel, which Christian 
mothers will do well to put into the hands of their daughters. 
But everything is relative ; we have met with American vege- 
tarians whose normal diet was dry meal, and who, when their 
appetite wanted stimulating, tickled it with wet meal ; and so, 
we can imagine that there are Evangelical circles in which 
" The Old Grey Church" is devoured as a powerful and inter- 
esting fiction. 

But perhaps the least readable of silly women's novels are 
the moderfi-antique species, which unfold to us the domestic 
life of Jannes and Jambres, the private love affairs of Sen- 
nacherib, or the mental struggles and ultimate conversion of 
Demetrius the silversmith. From most silly novels we can at 
least extract a laugh ; but those of the modern-antique school 
have a ponderous, a leaden kind of fatuity, under which we 
groan. What can be more demonstrative of the inability of 
literary women to measure their own powers than their fre- 
quent assumption of a task which can only be justified by the 
rarest concurrence of acquirement with genius ? The finest 
effort to reanimate the past is of course only approximative — is 



200 THE ESSAYS OF 

always more or less an infusion of the modern spirit into the 

ancient form — 

Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst, 

Das ist im Grand der Herren eigner Geist, 

In deni die Zeiten sich bespiegeln. 

Admitting that genius which has familiarized itself with all 
the relics of an ancient period can sometimes, by the force of 
its sympathetic divination, restore the missing notes in the 
"music of humanity," and reconstruct the fragments into a 
whole which will really bring the remote past nearer to us, and 
interpret it to our duller apprehension — this form of imagina- 
tive power must always be among the very rarest, because it 
demands as much accurate and minute knowledge as creative 
vigor. Yet we find ladies constantly choosing to make their 
mental mediocrity more conspicuous by clothing it in a mas- 
querade of ancient names ; by putting their feeble sentimental- 
ity into the mouths of Roman vestals or Egyptian princesses, 
and attributing their rhetorical arguments to Jewish high- 
priests and Greek philosophers. A recent example of this 
heavy imbecility is " Adonijah, a Tale of the Jewish Disper- 
sion," which forms part of a series, " uniting," we are told, 
" taste, humor, and sound principles." " Adonijah," we pre- 
sume, exemplifies the tale of " sound principles ;" the taste 
and humor are to be found in other members of the series. 
We are told on the cover that the incidents of this tale are 
"fraught with unusual interest," and the preface winds up 
thus : " To those who feel interested in the dispersed of Israel 
and Judea, these pages may afford, perhaps, information on an 
important subject, as well as amusement." Since the " im- 
portant subject" on which this book is to afford information is 
not specified, it may possibly lie in some esoteric meaning to 
which we have no key ; but if it has relation to the dispersed 
of Israel and Judea at any period of their history, we believe a 
tolerably well-informed school-girl already knows much more of 
it than she will find in this " Tale of the Jewish Dispersion." 
*' Adonijah" is simply the feeblest kind of love story, sup- 



SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 201 

posed to be instructive, we presume, because the hero is a 
Jewish captive and the heroine a Roman vestal ; because they 
and their friends are converted to Christianity after the short- 
est and easiest method approved by the " Society for Promot- 
ing the Conversion of the Jews ;" and because, instead of 
being written in plain language, it is adorned with that peculiar 
style of grandiloquence which is held by some lady novelists to 
give an antique coloring, and which we recognize at once in 
such phrases as these : — " the splendid regnal talent, un- 
doubtedly, possessed by the Emperor Nero" — " the expiring 
scion of a lofty stem" — " the virtuous partner of his couch" 
— "ah, by Vesta!" — and " I tell thee, Roman." Among 
the quotations which serve at once for instruction and orna- 
ment on the cover of this volume, there is one from Miss Sin- 
clair, which informs us that " Works of imagination are 
avowedly read by men of science, wisdom, and piety ;" from 
which we suppose the reader is to gather the cheering inference 
that Dr. Daubeny, Mr. Mill, or Mr. Maurice may openly in- 
dulge himself with the perusal of " Adonijah," without being 
obliged to secrete it among the sofa cushions, or read it by 
snatches under the dinner-table. 

1 * Be not a baker if your head be made of butter, ' ' says a 
homely proverb, which, being interpreted, may mean, let no 
woman rush into print who is not prepared for the conse- 
quences. We are aware that our remarks are in a very differ- 
ent tone from that of the reviewers who, with perennial recur- 
rence of precisely similar emotions, only paralleled, we imag- 
ine, in the experience of monthly nurses, tell one lady novel- 
ist after another that they " hail " her productions " with de- 
light." We are aware that the ladies at whom our criticism is 
pointed are accustomed to be told, in the choicest phraseology 
of puffery, that their pictures of life are brilliant, their charac- 
ters well drawn, their style fascinating, and their sentiments 
lofty. But if they are inclined to resent our plainness of 
speech, we ask them to reflect for a moment on the chary 



202 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

praise, and often captious blame, which their panegyrists give 
to writers whose works are on the way to become classics. No 
sooner does a woman show that she has genius or effective 
talent, than she receives the tribute of being moderately praised 
and severely criticised. By a peculiar thermometric adjust- 
ment, when a woman's talent is at zero, journalistic approbation 
is at the boiling pitch ; when she attains mediocrity, it is 
already at no more than summer heat ; and if ever she reaches 
excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point. 
Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs. Gaskell have been 
treated as cavalierly as if they had been men. And every critic 
who forms a high estimate of the share women may ultimately 
take in literature, will on principle abstain from any excep- 
tional indulgence toward the productions of literary women. 
For it must be plain to every one who looks impartially and ex- 
tensively into feminine literature that its greatest deficiencies 
are due hardly more to the want of intellectual power than to 
the want of those moral qualities that contribute to literary ex- 
cellence — patient diligence, a sense of the responsibility in- 
volved in publication, and an appreciation of the sacredness of 
the writer's art. In the majority of women's books you see 
that kind of facility which springs from the absence of any 
high standard ; that fertility in imbecile combination or feeble 
imitation which a little self-criticism would check and reduce 
to barrenness ; just as with a total want of musical ear people 
will sing out of tune, while a degree more melodic sensibility 
would suffice to render them silent. The foolish vanity of 
wishing to appear in print, instead of being counterbalanced by 
any consciousness of the intellectual or moral derogation im- 
plied in futile authorship, seems to be encouraged by the ex- 
tremely false impression that to write at all is a proof of supe- 
riority in a woman. On this ground we believe that the aver- 
age intellect of women is unfairly represented by the mass of 
feminine literature, and that while the few women who write 
well are very far above the ordinary intellectual level of their 
sex, the many women who write ill are very far below it. So 



SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS. 203 

that, after all, the severer critics are fulfilling a chivalrous duty 
in depriving the mere fact of feminine authorship of any false 
prestige which may give it a delusive attraction, and in recom- 
mending women of mediocre faculties — as at least a negative 
service they can render their sex — to abstain from writing. 

The standing apology for women who become writers with- 
out any special qualification is that society shuts them out 
from other spheres of occupation. Society is a very culpable 
entity, and has to answer for the manufacture of many unwhole- 
some commodities, from bad pickles to bad poetry. But 
society, like " matter,'' and Her Majesty's Government, and 
other lofty abstractions, has its share of excessive blame as well 
as excessive praise. Where there is oue woman who writes 
from necessity, we believe there are three women who write 
from vanity ; and besides, there is something so antispetic in 
the mere healthy fact of working for one's bread, that the most 
trashy and rotten kind of feminine literature is not likely to 
have been produced under such circumstances. " In all labor 
there is profit;" but ladies' silly novels, we imagine, are less 
the result of labor than of busy idleness. 

Happily, we are not dependent on argument to prove that 
Fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after 
their kind, fully equal men. A cluster of great names, both 
living and dead, rush to our memories in evidence that women 
can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest — 
novels, too, that have a precious speciality, lying quite apart 
from masculine aptitudes and experience. No educational re- 
strictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, 
and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid require- 
ments. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and 
yet be beautiful ; we have only to pour in the right elements 
— genuine observation, humor, and passion. But it is pre- 
cisely this absence of rigid requirement which constitutes the 
fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women. 
Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their 
power of playing on the piano ; here certain positive difficulties 



204 THE ESSAYS OE "GEORGE ELIOT." 

of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence inevita- 
bly breaks down. Every art which has its absolute technique 
is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere 
left-handed imbecility. But in novel-writing there are no bar- 
riers for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to 
prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery. 
And so we have again and again the old story of La Fontaine's 
ass, who puts his nose to the flute, and, finding that he elicits 
some sound, exclaims, " Moi, aussi, je joue de la flute" — a 
fable which we commend, at parting, to the consideration of 
any feminine reader who is in danger of adding to the number 
of " silly novels by lady novelists." 



VII. 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS : THE 
POET YOUNG.* 

The study of men, as they have appeared in different ages 
and under various social conditions, may be considered as the 
natural history of the race. Let us, then, for a moment 
imagine ourselves, as students of this natural history, " dredg- 
ing" the first half of the eighteenth century in search of 
specimens. About the year 1730 we have hauled up a re- 
markable individual of the species divine — a surprising name, 
considering the nature of the animal before us, but we are used 
to unsuitable names in natural history. Let us examine this 
individual at our leisure. He is on the verge of fifty, and has 
recently undergone his metamorphosis into the clerical form. 
Rather a paradoxical specimen, if you observe him narrowly : 
a sort of cross between a sycophant and a psalmist ; a poet 
whose imagination is alternately fired by the " Last Day" 
and by a creation of peers, who fluctuates between rhapsodic 
applause of King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah. 
After spending " a foolish youth, the sport of peers and 
poets," after being a hanger-on of the profligate Duke of 
Wharton, after aiming in vain at a parliamentary career, and 
angling for pensions and preferment with fulsome dedications 
and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted with his imperfect 
success, and has determined to retire from the general men- 

* 1. "Young's Works." 1767. 2. "Johnson's Lives of the 
Poets." Edited by Peter Cunningham Murray : 1854. 3. " Life of 
Edward Young, LL.D." By Dr. Doran. Prefixed to " Night 
Thoughts." Eoutledge : 1853. 4. Gentleman's Magazine, 1782. 5. 
"Nichols's Literary Anecdotes." Vol.1. 6. " Spence's Anecdotes." 



206 THE ESSAYS OF 

dicancy business to a particular branch ; in other words, he 
has determined on that renunciation of the world implied in 
" taking orders, " with the prospect of a good living and an 
advantageous matrimonial connection. m And no man can be 
better fitted for an Established Church. He personifies com- 
pletely her nice balance of temporalities and spiritualities. Ho 
is equally impressed with the momentousness of death and of 
burial fees ; he languishes at once for immortal life and for 
44 livings ;" he has a fervid attachment to patrons in general, 
but on the whole prefers the Almighty. He will teach, with 
something more than official conviction, the nothingness of 
earthly things ; and he will feel something more than private 
disgust if his meritorious efforts in directing men's attention to 
another world are not rewarded by substantial preferment in 
this. His secular man believes in cambric bands and silk 
stockings as characteristic attire for " an ornament of religion 
and virtue ;" hopes courtiers will never forget to copy Sir 
Robert Walpole ; and writes begging letters to the King's 
mistress. His spiritual man recognizes no motives more 
familiar than Golgotha and " the skies ;" it walks in grave- 
yards, or it soars among the stars. His religion exhausts itself 
in ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no medium between the 
ecstatic and the sententious. If it were not for the prospect 
of immortality, he considers, it would be wise and agreeable to 
be indecent or to murder one's father ; and, heaven apart, it 
would be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave. 
Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and the brute ; the 
brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its 44 relation to 
the stalls," and frightened into moderation by the contempla- 
tion of death-beds and skulls ; the angel is to be developed by 
vituperating this world and exalting the next ; and by this 
double process you get the Christian — " the highest style of 
man." With all this, our new-made divine is an unmistak- 
able poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the worldling and 
the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean fire. 
He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS. 207 

astronomical religion and his charnel-house morality, in last- 
ing verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold 
and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive : for this divine 
is Edward Young, the future author of the " Night Thoughts. " 
It would be extremely ill-bred in us to suppose that our 
readers are not acquainted with the facts of Young's life ; they 
are among the things that " every one knows ;" but we have 
observed that, with regard to these universally known matters, 
the majority of readers like to be treated after the plan sug- 
gested by Monsieur Jourdain. When that distinguished bour- 
geois was asked if he knew Latin, he replied, " Oui, mais faites 
comme si je ne le savaispas." Assuming, then, as a polite 
writer should, that our readers know everything about Young, 
it will be a direct sequitur from that assumption that we should 
proceed as if they knew nothing, and recall the incidents of his 
biography with as much particularity as we may without 
trenching on the space we shall need for our main purpose — the 
reconsideration of his character as a moral and religious poet. 
Judging from Young's works, one might imagine that the 
preacher had been organized in him by hereditary transmission 
through a long line of clerical forefathers — that the diamonds 
of the " Night Thoughts" had been slowly condensed from the 
charcoal of ancestral sermons. Yet it was not so. His grand- 
father, apparently, wrote himself gentleman, not clerk ; and 
there is no evidence that, preaching had run in the family blood 
before it took that turn in the person of the poet's father, who 
was quadruply clerical, being at once rector, prebendary, court 
chaplain, and dean. Young was born at his father's rectory of 
Upham in 1681. We may confidently assume that even the 
author of the " Night Thoughts" came into the world without 
a wig ; but, apart from Dr. Doran's authority, we should not 
have ventured to state that the excellent rector " kissed, with 
dignified emotion, his only son and intended namesake." Dr. 
Doran doubtless knows this, from his intimate acquaintance 
with clerical physiology and psychology. He has ascertained 
that the paternal emotions of prebendaries have a sacerdotal 



208 THE ESSAYS OF 

quality, and that the very chyme and chyle of a rector are 
conscious of the gown and band. 

In due time the boy went to Winchester College, and sub- 
sequently, though not till he was twenty-two, to Oxford, 
where, for his father's sake, he was befriended by the wardens 
of two colleges, and in 1708, three years after his father's 
death, nominated by Archbishop Tenison to a law fellowship at 
All Souls. Of Young's life at Oxford in these years, hardly 
anything is known. His biographer, Croft, has nothing to tell 
us but the vague report that, when " Young found himself 
independent and his own master at All Souls, he was not the 
ornament to religion and morality that he afterward became," 
and the perhaps apocryphal anecdote, that Tindal, the atheist, 
confessed himself embarrassed by the originality of Young's 
arguments. Both the report and the anecdote, however, are 
borne out by indirect evidence. As to the latter, Young has 
left us sufficient proof that he was fond of arguing on the 
theological side, and that he had his own way of treating old 
subjects. As to the former, we learn that Pope, after saying 
other things which we know to be true of Young, added, that 
he passed " a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets ;" 
and, from all the indications we possess of his career till he was 
nearly fifty, we are inclined to think that Pope's statement 
only errs by defect, and that he should rather have said, " a 
foolish youth and middle age." It is not likely that Young 
was a very hard student, for he impressed Johnson, who saw 
him in his old age, as *• not a great scholar," and as sur- 
prisingly ignorant of what Johnson thought " quite common 
maxims" in literature ; and there is no evidence that he filled 
either his leisure or his purse by taking pupils. His career as 
an author did not commence till he was nearly thirty, even 
dating from the publication of a portion of the " Last Day," 
in the Tatler ; so that he could hardly have been absorbed in 
composition. But where the fully developed insect is para- 
sitic, we believe the larva is usually parasitic also, and we shall 
probably not be far wrong in supposing that Young at Oxford, 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS. 209 

as elsewhere, spent a good deal of his time in hanging about 
possible and actual patrons, and accommodating himself to the 
habits with considerable flexibility of conscience and of tongue ; 
being none the less ready, upon occasion, to present himself as 
the champion of theology and to rhapsodize at convenient 
moments in the company of the skies or of skulls. That brill- 
iant profligate, the Duke of Wharton, to whom Young after- 
ward clung as his chief patron, was at this time a mere boy ; 
and, though it is probable that their intimacy had commenced, 
since the Duke's father and mother were friends of the old 
dean, that intimacy ought not to aggravate any unfavorable 
inference as to Young's Oxford life. It is less likely that he 
fell into any exceptional vice than that he differed from the 
men around him chiefly in his episodes of theological advocacy 
and rhapsodic solemnity. He probably sowed his wild oats 
after the coarse fashion of his times, for he has left us sufficient 
evidence that his moral sense was not delicate ; but his com- 
panions, who were occupied in sowing their own oats, perhaps 
took it as a matter of course that he should be a rake, and were 
only struck with the exceptional circumstance that he was a 
pious and moralizing rake. 

There is some irony in the fact that the two first poetical 
productions of Young, published in the same year, were his 
" Epistles to Lord Lansdowne," celebrating the recent creation 
of peers— Lord Lansdowne's creation in particular ; and the 
"Last Day." Other poets besides Young found the device 
for obtaining a Tory majority by turning twelve insignificant 
commoners into insignificant lords, an irresistible stimulus to 
verse ; but no other poet showed so versatile an enthusiasm— 
so nearly equal an ardor for the honor of the new baron and 
the honor of the Deity. But the twofold nature of the syco- 
phant and the psalmist is not more strikingly shown in the con- 
trasted themes of the two poems than in the transitions from 
bombast about monarchs to bombast about the resurrection, 
in the " Last Day" itself. The dedication of the poem to 
Queen Anne, Young afterward suppressed, for he was always 



210 THE ESSAYS OF " GEOKGE ELIOT." 

asliained of having flattered a dead patron. In this dedication, 
Croft tells -us, " he gives her Majesty praise indeed for her 
victories, but says that the author is more pleased to see her 
rise from this lower world, soaring above the clouds, passing 
the first and second heavens, and leaving the fixed stars behind 
her ; nor will he lose her there, he says, but keep her still in 
view through the boundless spaces on the other side of creation, 
in her journey toward eternal bliss, till he behold the heaven 
of heavens open, and angels receiving and conveying her still 
onward from the stretch of his imagination, which tires in her 
pursuit, and falls back again to earth." 

The self-criticism which prompted the suppression of the 
dedication did not, however, lead him to improve either the 
rhyme or the reason of the unfortunate couplet — 

" When other Bourbons reign in other lands, 
And, if men's sins forbid not, other Annes." 

In the " Epistle to Lord Lansdowne" Young indicates his 
taste for the drama ; and there is evidence that his tragedy of 
" Busiris" was "in the theatre" as early as this very year, 
1713, though it was not brought on the stage till nearly six 
years later ; so that Young was now very decidedly bent on 
authorship, for which his degree of B.C.L., taken in this 
year, was doubtless a magical equipment. Another poem, 
" The Force of Religion ; or, Vanquished Love," founded on 
the execution of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, quickly 
followed, showing fertility in feeble and tasteless verse ; and 
on the Queen's death, in 1714, Young lost no time in making 
a poetical lament for a departed patron a vehicle for extrav- 
agant laudation of the new monarch. No further literary 
production of his appeared until 1716, when a Latin oration, 
which he delivered on the foundation of the Codrington 
Library at All Souls, gave him a new opportunity for display- 
ing his alacrity in inflated panegyric. 

In 171 7 it is probable that Young accompanied the Duke of 
Wharton to Ireland, though so slender are the materials for his 



WORLDLINESS AND OTH ER- WOULD LI NESS. 2li 

biography that the chief basis for this supposition is a passage 
in his " Conjectures on Original Composition," written when 
he was nearly eighty, in which he intimates that he had once 
been in that country. But there are many facts surviving to 
indicate that for the next eight or nine years Young was a 
sort of attache of Wharton's. In 1719, according to legal 
records, the Duke granted him an annuity, in consideration of 
his having relinquished the office of tutor to Lord Burleigh, 
with a life annuity of £100 a year, on his Grace's assurances 
that he would provide for him in a much more ample mannc r. 
And again, from the same evidence, it appears that in 1721 
Young received from Wharton a bond for £600, in compensa- 
tion of expenses incurred in standing for Parliament at the 
Duke's desire, and as an earnest of greater services which his 
Grace had promised him on his refraining from the spiritual 
and temporal advantages of taking orders, with a certainty 
of two livings in the gift of his college. It is clear, there- 
fore, that lay advancement, as long as there was any chance of 
it, had more attractions for Young than clerical preferment ; 
and that at this time he accepted the Duke of Wharton as the 
pilot of his career. 

A more creditable relation of Young's was his friendship 
with Tickell, with whom he was in the habit of interchanging 
criticisms, and to whom in 1719 — the same year, let us note, 
in which he took his doctor's degree — he addressed his " Lines 
on the Death of Addison." Close upon these followed his 
" Paraphrase of part of the Book of Job," with a dedication 
to Parker, recently made Lord Chancellor, showing that the 
possession of Wharton's patronage did not prevent Young 
from fishing in other waters. He knew nothing of Parker, 
but that did not prevent him from magnifying the new Chan- 
cellor's merits ; on the other hand, he did know Wharton, but 
this again did not prevent him from prefixing to his tragedy, 
" The Revenge," which appeared in 1721, a dedication at- 
tributing to the Duke all virtues, as well as all accomplish- 
ments. In the* concluding sentence of this dedication, Young 



212 THE ESSAYS OF 

naively indicates that a considerable ingredient in his gratitude 
was a lively sense of anticipated favors. " My present fort- 
une is his bounty, and my future his care ; which I will 
venture to say will always be remembered to his honor ; since 
he, I know, intended his generosity as an encouragement to 
merit, through his very pardonable partiality to one who bears 
him so sincere a duty and respect, I happen to receive the 
benefit of it." Young was economical with his ideas and 
images ; he was rarely satisfied with using a clever thing once, 
and this bit of ingenious humility was afterward made to do 
duty in the " Instalment," a poem addressed to Walpole : 

" Be this thy partial smile, from censure free, 
'Twas meant for merit, though it fell on me." 

It was probably " The Revenge" that Young was writing 
when, as we learn from Spence's anecdotes, the Duke of 
Wharton gave him a skull with a candle fixed in it, as the most 
appropriate lamp by which to write tragedy. According to 
Young's dedication, the Duke was " accessory" to the scenes 
of this tragedy in a more important way, " not only by sug- 
gesting the most beautiful incident in them, but by making all 
possible provision for the success of the whole." A statement 
which is credible, not indeed on the ground of Young's ded- 
icatory assertion, but from the known ability of the Duke, 
who, as Pope tells us, possessed 

" each gift of Nature and of Art, 
And wanted nothing but an honest heart." 

The year 1Y22 seems to have been the period of a visit to 
Mr. Dodmgton, of Eastbury, in Dorsetshire — the " pure 
Dorsetian downs" celebrated by Thomson — in which Young 
made the acquaintance of Voltaire ; for in the subsequent dedi- 
cation of his " Sea Piece" to " Mr. Voltaire," he recalls their 
meeting on " Dorset Downs ;" and it was in this year that 
Christopher Pitt, a gentleman-poet of those days, addressed an 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 213 

" Epistle to Dr. Edward Young, at Eastbury, in Dorsetshire," 
which has at least the merit of this biographical couplet : 

" While with your Dodington retired you sit, 
Charm'd with his flowing Burgundy and wit." 

Dodington, apparently, was charmed in his turn, for he told 
Dr. Wharton that Young was " far superior to the French poet 
in the variety and novelty of his bon-mots and repartees." 
Unfortunately, the only specimen of Young's wit on this occa- 
sion that has been preserved to us is the epigram represented as 
an extempore retort (spoken aside, surely) to Voltaire's criti- 
cism of Milton's episode of sin and death : 

" Thou art so witty, profligate, and thin, 
At once, we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin ;" — 

an epigram which, in the absence of " flowing Burgundy," 
does not strike us as remarkably brilliant. Let us give Young 
the benefit of the doubt thrown on the genuineness of this 
epigram by his own poetical dedication, in which he represents 
himself as having " soothed " Voltaire's "rage" against 
Milton " with gentle rhymes ;" though in other respects that 
dedication is anything but favorable to a high estimate of 
Young's wit. Other evidence apart, we should not be eager 
for the after-dinner conversation of the man who wrote : 

" Thine is the Drama, how renown'd ! 
Thine Epic's loftier trump to sound ;- 
But let Avion' s sea-strung harp he mine ; 
But where's his dolphin ? Knowst thou where ? 
May that be found in thee, Voltaire!" 

The " Satires" appeared in 1725 and 1726, each, of course, 
with its laildatory dedication and its compliments insinuated 
among the rhymes. The seventh and last is dedicated to Sir 
Robert Walpole, is very short, and contains nothing in par- 
ticular except lunatic flattery of George the First and his prime 



2H THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

minister, attributing that royal hog's late escape from a storm 
at ;ea to the miraculous influence of his grand and virtuous 
soul — for George, he says, rivals the angels : 

" George, who in foes can soft affections raise, 
And charm envenom'd satire into praise. 
Nor human rage alone his pow'r perceives, 
But the mad winds and the tumultuous waves, 
Ev'n storms (Death's fiercest ministers !) forbear, 
And in their own wild empire learn to spare. 
Thus, Nature's self, supporting Man's decree, 
Styles Britain's sovereign, sovereign of the sea." 

As for "Walpole, what he felt at this tremendous crisis 

' ' No powers of language, but his own, can tell, 
His own, which Nature and the Graces form, 
At will, to raise, or hush, the civil storm. ' ' 

It is a coincidence worth noticing, that this seventh Satire 
was published in 1*726, and that the warrant of George the 
First, granting Young a pension of £200 a year from Lady- 
day, 1725, is dated May 3d, 1726. The gratitude exhibited 
in this Satire may have been chiefly prospective, but the 
" Instalment," a poem inspired by the thrilling event ot 
Walpole's installation as Knight of the Garter, was clearly 
written with the double ardor of a man who has got a pension 
and hopes for something more. His emotion about Walpole 
is precisely at the same pitch as his subsequent emotion about 
the Second Advent. In the " Instalment" he says : 

" "With invocations some their hearts inflame ; 
I need no muse, a Walpole is my theme."' 

And of God coming to judgment, he says, in the " Night 
Thoughts :" 

" I find my inspiration is my theme ; 
The yrandeur of my subject is my muse." 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 215 

Nothing can be feebler than this " Instalment," except in 
the strength of impudence with which the writer professes to 
scorn the prostitution of fair fame, the "profanation of 
celestial fire." 

Herbert Croft tells us that Young made more than three 
thousand pounds by his " Satires"— a surprising statement, 
taken in connection with the reasonable doubt he throws on the 
story related in Spence's " Anecdotes," that the Duke of 
Wharton gave Young £2000 for this work. Young, however, 
seems to have been tolerably fortunate in the pecuniary results 
of his publications ; and, with his literary profits, his annuity 
from Wharton, his fellowship, and his pension, not to mention 
other bounties which may be inferred from the high merits he 
discovers in many men of wealth and position, we may fairly 
suppose that he now laid the foundation of the considerable 
fortune he left at his death. 

It is probable that the Duke of Wharton's final departure for 
the Continent and disgrace at Court in 1726, and the con- 
sequent cessation of Young's reliance on his patronage, tended 
not only to heighten the temperature of his poetical enthu- 
siasm for Sir Robert Walpole, but also to turn his thoughts 
toward the Church again, as the second-best means of rising 
in the world. On the accession of George the Second, Young 
found the same transcendent merits in him as in his predeces- 
sor, and celebrated them in a style of poetry previously un- 
attempted by him— the Pindaric ode, a poetic form which 
helped him to surpass himself in furious bombast. " Ocean, 
an Ode : concluding with a Wish," was the title of this 
piece. He afterward pruned it, and cut off, among other 
things, the concluding Wish, expressing the yearning for 
humble retirement, which, of course, had prompted him to the 
effusion ; but we may judge of the rejected stanzas by the 
quality of those he has allowed to remain. For example, 
calling on Britain's dead mariners to rise and meet their 
" country's full-blown glory" in the person of the new King, 
he says : 



216 THE ESSAYS OF 

" "What powerful charm 

Can Death disarm ? 
Tour long, your iron slumbers break ? 

By Jove, by Fame, 

By George's name, 
Awake ! awake ! awake ! awake !" 

Soon after this notable production, which was written with 
the ripe folly of forty-seven, Young took orders, and was 
presently appointed chaplain to the King. " The Brothers," 
his third and last tragedy, which was already in rehearsal, he 
now withdrew from the stage, and sought reputation m a 
way more accordant with the decorum of his new profession, 
by turning prose writer. But after publishing " A True 
Estimate of Human Life," with a dedication to the Queen, as 
one of the " most shining representatives" of God on earth, 
and a sermon, entitled "An Apology for Princes ; or, the 
Reverence due to Government," preached before the House of 
Commons, his Pindaric ambition again seized him, and he 
matched his former ode by another, called " Imperium Pelagi, 
a Naval Lyric ; written in imitation of Pindar's spirit, occa- 
sioned by his Majesty's return from Hanover, 1729, and the 
succeeding Peace." Since he afterward suppressed this second 
ode, we must suppose that it was rather worse than the first. 
Next came his two ' ' Epistles to Pope, concerning the Authors 
of the Age," remarkable for nothing but the audacity of 
affectation with which the most servile of poets professes to 
despise servility. 

In 1730 Young was presented by his college with the rec- 
tory of Welwyn, in Hertfordshire, and, in the following year, 
when he was just fifty, he married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a 
widow with two children, who seems to have been in favor 
with Queen Caroline, and who probably had an income — two 
attractions which doubtless enhanced the power of her other 
charms. Pastoral duties and domesticity probably cured 
Young of some bad habits ; but, unhappily, they did not cure 
him either of flattery or of fustian. Three more odes fol- 



Abilities. 


Want. 


Good Manners. 


Sufferings 


Service. 


and 


Age. 


Zeal 



WORLDLIN'ESS AND OTHER-WORLDLTNESS. 217 

lowed, quite as bad as those of his bachelorhood, except that in 
the third he announced the wise resolution of never writing 
another. It must have been about this time, since Young was 
now " turned of fifty," that he wrote the letter to Mrs. 
Howard (afterward Lady Suffolk), George the Second's mis- 
tress, which proves that he used other engines, besides Pindaric 
ones, in " besieging Court favor.' ' The letter is too char- 
acteristic to be ommitted : 

" Monday Morning. 
" Madam : I know his Majesty's goodness to his servants, and his 
love of justice in general, so well, that I am confident, if his Majesty 
knew my case, I should not have any cause to despair of his gracious 
favor to me. 



for his 
Majesty. 

These, madam, are the proper points of consideration in the person 
that humbly hopes his Majesty's favor. 

" As to Abilities, all I can presume to say is, I have done the best I 
could to improve them. 

" As to Good manners, I desire no favor, if any just objection lies 
against them. 

" As for Service, I have been near seven years in his Majesty's and 
never omitted any duty in it, which few can say. 

" As for Age, I am turned of fifty. 

" As for Want, I have no manner of preferment. 

" As for Sufferings, I have lost £300 per ann. by being in his Maj- 
esty's service ; as I have shown in a Representation which his Majesty 
has been so good as to read and consider. 

" As for Zeal, I have written nothing without showing my duty to 
their Majesties, and some pieces are dedicated to them. 

" This, madam, is the short and true state of my case. They that 
make their court to the ministers, and not their Majesties, succeed 
better. If my case deserves some consideration, and you can serve 
me in it, I humbly hope and believe you will : I shall, therefore, 
trouble you no farther ; but beg leave to subscribe myself, with 
truest respect and gratitude, 

" Yours, etc., Edward Young. 



218 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

" P.S. I have some hope that my Lord Townshend is my friend ; 
if therefore soon, and before he leaves the court, you had an oppor" 
tunity of mentioning me, with that favor you have been so good to 
show, I think it would not fail of success ; and, if not, I shall owe 
you more than any." — " Suffolk Letters," vol. i. p. 285. 

Young's wife died in 1741, leaving him one son, born in 
1733. That he had attached himself strongly to her two 
daughters by her former marriage, there is better evidence in 
the report, mentioned by Mrs. Montagu, of his practical kind- 
ness and liberality to the younger, than in his lamentations 
over the elder as the " Narcissa" of the " Night Thoughts." 
" Narcissa" had died in 1735, shortly after marriage to Mr. 
Temple, the son of Lord Palmerston ; and Mr. Temple him- 
self, after a second marriage, died in 1740, a year before Lady 
Elizabeth Young. These, then, are the three deaths supposed to 
have inspired " The Complaint," which forms the three first 
books of the " Night Thoughts :" 

"Insatiate archer, could not one suffice ? 
Thy shaft flew thrice : and thrice my peace was slain : 
And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had fill'd her horn." 

Since we find Young departing from the truth of dates, in 
order to heighten the effect of his calamity, or at least of his 
climax, we need not be surprised that he allowed his imagina- 
tion great freedom in other matters besides chronology, and 
that the character of " Philander" can, by no process, be made 
to fit Mr. Temple. The supposition that the much-lectured 
" Lorenzo" of the " Night Thoughts" was Young's own son is 
hardly rendered more absurd by the fact that the poem was 
written when that son was a boy, than by the obvious artifi- 
ciality of the characters Young introduces as targets for his 
arguments and rebukes. Among all the trivial efforts of con- 
jectured criticism, there can hardly be one more futile than 
the attempts to discover the original of those pitiable lay-figures, 
the " Lorenzos" and " Altamonts" of Young's didactic prose 
and poetry. His muse never stood face to face with a gen- 



WORLDLLNESS AND OTHER- WOiiLDLltfESS. 219 

nine living human being ; she would have been as much star- 
tled by such an encounter as a necromancer whose incantations 
and blue fire had actually conjured up a demon. 

The " Night Thoughts" appeared between 1741 and 1745. 
Although he declares in them that he has chosen God for his 
" patron" henceforth, this is not at all to the prejudice of some 
half dozen lords, duchesses, and right honorables who have 
the privilege of sharing finely-turned compliments with their co- 
patron. The line which closed the Second Night in the earlier 
editions — 

" Wits spare not Heaven, Wilmington ! — nor thee" — 

is an intense specimen of that perilous juxtaposition of ideas by 
which Young, in his incessant search after point and novelty, 
unconsciously converts his compliments into sarcasms ; and his 
apostrophe to the moon as more likely to be favorable to his 
song if he calls her " fair Portland of the skies," is worthy 
even of his Pindaric ravings. His ostentatious renunciation of 
worldly schemes, and especially of his twenty-years' siege of 
Court favor, are in the tone of one who retains some hope in 
the midst of his querulousness. 

He descended from the astronomical rhapsodies of his 
" Ninth Night," published in 1745, to more terrestrial strains 
in his " Reflections on the Public Situation of the Kingdom," 
dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle ; but in this critical year 
we get a glimpse of him through a more prosaic and less re- 
fracting medium. He spent a part of the year at Tunbridge 
Wells ; and Mrs. Montagu, who was there too, gives a very 
lively picture of the " divine Doctor" in her letters to the 
Duchess of Portland, on whom Young had bestowed the super- 
lative bombast to which we have recently alluded. We shall 
borrow the quotations from Dr. Doran, in spite of their length, 
because, to our mind, they present the most agreeable portrait 
we possess of Young : 

" I have great joy in Dr. Young, whom I disturbed in a reverie. 
At first he started, then bowed, then fell back into a surprise ; then 



22'0 THE ESSAYS OF " GEOKGE ELIOT." 

began a speech, relapsed into his astonishment two or three times, 
forgot what he had been saying ; began a new subject, and so went 
on. I told him your grace desired he would write longer letters ; 
to which he cried ' Ha ! ' most emphatically, and I leave you to inter- 
pret what it meant. He has made a friendship with one person here, 
whom I believe you would not imagine to have been made for his 
bosom friend. You would, perhaps, suppose it was a bishop or 
dean, a prebend, a pious preacher, a clergyman of exemplary life, 
or, if a layman, of most virtuous conversation, one that had para- 
phrased St. Matthew, or wrote comments on St. Paul. . . . You 
would not guess that this associate of the doctor's was — old Cibber ! 
Certainly, in their religious, moral, and civil character, there is no 
relation ; but in their dramatic capacity there is some. — Mrs. 
Montagu was not aware that Cibber, whom Young had named not 
disparagingly in his Satires, was the brother of his old school-fellow ; 
but to return to our hero. ' The waters,' says Mrs. Montagu, ' have 
raised his spirits to a fine pitch, as your grace will imagine, when I 
tell you how sublime an answer he made to a very vulgar question. 
I asked him how long he stayed at the Wells ; he said, ' As long as my 
rival stayed ; — as long as the sun did. ' Among the visitors at the 
Wells were Lady Sunderland (wife of Sir Eobert Sutton), and 
her sister, Mrs. Tichborne. ' He did an admirable thing to Lady 
Sunderland : on her mentioning Sir Eobert Sutton, he asked 
her where Sir Eobert's lady was ; on which we all laughed very 
heartily, and I brought him off, half ashamed, to my lodgings, 
where, during breakfast, he assured me he had asked after Lady Sun- 
derland, because he had a great honor for her ; and that, having a 
respect for her sister, he designed to have inquired after her, if we 
had not put it out of his head by laughing at him. You must know, 
Mrs. Tichborne sat next to Lady Sunderland. It would have been 
admirable to have had him finish his compliment in that man- 
ner.' .-...' His expressions all bear the stamp of novelty, and 
his thoughts of sterling sense. He practises a kind of philosophical 
abstinence. ... He carried Mrs. Eolt and myself to Tunbridge, 
five miles from hence, where we were to see some fine old ruins. 
First rode the doctor on a tall steed, decently caparisoned in dark 
gray ; next, ambled Mrs. Eolt on a hackney horse ; . . . then 
followed your humble servant on a milk-white palfrey. I rode on in 
safety, and at leisure to observe the company, especially the two fig- 
ures that brought up the rear. The first was my servant, valiantly 
armed with two uncharged pistols ; the last was the doctor's man, 
whose uncombed hair so resembled the mane of the horse he rode, 



WORLDLINESS A2JD OTHER- WORLDLINESS. 221 

one could not help imagining they were of kin, and wishing, for the 
honor of the family, that they had had one comb betwixt them. On 
his head was a velvet cap, much resembling a black saucepan, and on 
his side hung a little basket. At last we arrived at the King's Head, 
where the loyalty of the doctor induced him to alight ; and then, 
knight-errant-like, he took his damsels from off their palfreys, and 
courteously handed us into the inn.' . . . The party returned 
to the "Wells ; and ' the silver Cynthia held up her lamp in the heav- 
ens ' the while. ' The night silenced all but our divine doctor, who 
sometimes uttered things fit to be spoken in a season when all 
nature seems to be hushed and hearkening. I followed, gathering 
wisdom as I went, till I found, by my horse's stumbling, that I was 
in a bad road, and that the blind was leading the blind. So I placed 
my servant between the doctor and myself ; which he not perceiving, 
went on in a most philosophical strain, to the great admiration of 
my poor clown of a servant, who, not being wrought up to any pitch 
of enthusiasm, nor making any answer to all the fine things he heard, 
the doctor, wondering I was dumb, and grieving I was so stupid, 
looked round and declared his surprise.' " 

Young's oddity and absence of mind are gathered from 
other sources besides these stories of Mrs. Montagu's, and gave 
rise to the report that he was the original of Fielding's " Par- 
son Adams ;" but this Croft denies, and mentions another 
Young, who really sat for the portrait, and who, we imagine, 
had both more Greek and more genuine simplicity than the 
poet. His love of chatting with Colley Cibber was an indica- 
tion that the old predilection for the stage survived, in spite of 
his emphatic contempt for " all joys but joys that never can 
expire ;" and the production of " The Brothers," at Drury 
Lane in 1753, after a suppression of fifteen years, was perhaps 
not entirely due to the expressed desire to give the proceeds to 
the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The author's 
profits were not more then £400 — in those days a disappointing- 
sum ; and Young, as we learn from his friend Richardson, did 
not make this the limit of his donation, but gave a thousand 
guineas to the Society. " I had some talk with him," says 
Richardson, in one of his letters, " about this great action. 
* I always,' said he, ' intended to do something handsome for 



222 THE ESSAYS OF ''GEORGE ELIOT." 

the Society. Had I deferred it to my demise, I should have 
given away my son's money. All the world are inclined to 
pleasure ; could I have given myself a greater by disposing of 
the sum to a different use, I should have done it.' " Surely 
he took his old friend Richardson for " Lorenzo !" 

His next work was " The Centaur not Fabulous ; in Six 
Letters to a Friend, on the Life in Vogue," which reads very 
much like the most objurgatory parts of the " Night Thoughts" 
reduced to prose. It is preceded by a preface which, though 
addressed to a lady, is in its denunciations of vice as grossly 
indecent and almost as flippant as the epilogues written by 
" friends," which he allowed to be reprinted after his tragedies 
in the latest edition of his works. We like much better than 
"The Centaur," ." Conjectures on Original Composition," 
written in 1759, for the sake, he says, of communicating to the 
world the well-known anecdote about Addison's deathbed, and 
with the exception of his poem on Resignation, the last thing- 
he ever published. 

The estrangement from his son, which must have embittered 
the later years of his life, appears to have begun not many 
years after the mother's death. On the marriage of her second 
daughter, who had previously presided over Young's household, 
a Mrs. Hallows, understood to be a woman of discreet age, and 
the daughter (a widow) of a clergyman who was an old friend 
of Young's, became housekeeper at Welwyn. Opinions about 
ladies are apt to differ. " Mrs. Hallows was a woman of piety, 
improved by reading," says one witness. " She was a very 
coarse woman," says Dr. Johnson ; and we shall presently find 
some indirect evidence that her temper was perhaps not quite 
so much improved as her piety. Servants, it seems, were not 
fond of remaining long in the house with her ; a satirical 
curate, named Kidgell, hints at " drops of juniper" taken as a 
cordial (but perhaps he was spiteful, and a teetotaller) ; and 
Young's son is said to have told his father that " an old man 
should not resign himself to the management of anybody." 
The result was, that the son was banished from home for the 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 223 

rest of his father's life-time, though Young seems never to 
have thought of disinheriting him. 

Our latest glimpses of the aged poet are derived from certain 
letters of Mr. Jones, his curate — letters preserved in the British 
Museum, and happily made accessible to common mortals in 
Nichols's "Anecdotes." Mr. Jones was a man of some lit- 
erary activity and ambition — a collector of interesting doc- 
uments, and one of those concerned in the " Free and Candid 
Disquisitions," the design of which was " to point out such 
things in our ecclesiastical establishment as want to be reviewed 
and amended." On these and kindred subjects he corre- 
sponded with Dr. Birch, occasionally troubling him with 
queries and manuscripts. We have a respect for Mr. Jones. 
Unlike any person who ever troubled us with queries or manu- 
scripts, he mitigates the infliction by such gifts as " a fat 
pullet," wishing he " had anything better to send ; but this 
depauperizing vicarage (of Alconbury) too often checks the 
freedom and forwardness of my mind." Another day comes a 
" pound canister of tea," another, a " young fatted goose." 
Clearly, Mr. Jones was entirely unlike your literary correspond- 
ents of the present day ; he forwarded manuscripts, but he had 
"bowels," and forwarded poultry too. His first letter from 
Welwyn is dated June, 1759, not quite six years before 
Young's death. In June, IV 62, he expresses a wish to go to 
London " this summer. But," he continues : 

" My time and pains are almost continually taken up here, 
and ... I have been (I now find) a considerable loser, upon the 
whole, by continuing here so long. The consideration of this, and 
the inconveniences I sustained, and do still experience, from my late 
illness, obliged me at last to acquaint the Doctor (Young) with my 
case, and to assure him that I plainly perceived the duty and con- 
finement here to be too much for me ; for which reason I must (I 
said) beg to be at liberty to resign my charge at Michaelmas. I be- 
gan to give him these notices in February, when I was very ill ; and 
now I perceive, by what he told me the other day, that he is in some 
difficulty : for which reason he is at last (he says) resolved to adver- 
tise, and even (wluch is much wondered at) to raise the salary considerably 



224 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

higher. (What he allowed my predecessors was 20Z. per annum ; and 
now he proposes 50?., as he tells me.) I never asked him to raise it 
for me, though I well knew it was not equal to the duty ; nor did I 
say a word about myself when he lately suggested to me his inten- 
tions upon this subject." 

In a postscript to this letter he says : 

" I may mention to you farther, as a friend that may be trusted, 
that in all likelihood the poor old gentleman will not find it a very 
easy matter, unless by dint of money, and force upon himself, to pro- 
cure a man that he can like for his next curate, nor one thai will stay 
with him so long as I have done. Then, his great age will recur to peo- 
ple's thoughts ; and if he has any foibles, either in temper or con- 
duct, they will be sure not to be forgotten on this occasion by those 
who know him ; and those who do not will probably be on their 
guard. On these and the like considerations, it is by no means an 
eligible office to be seeking out for a curate for him, as he has several 
times wished me to do ; and would, if he knew that I am now writ- 
ing to you, wish your assistance also. But my best friends here, who 
well foresee the probable consequences, and wish me well, earnestly dis- 
suade me from complying : and I will decline the office with as much 
decency as I can : but high salary will, I suppose, fetch in some- 
body or other, soon." 

In the following July he writes : 

" The old gentleman here (I may venture to tell you freely) seems 
to me to be in a pretty odd way of late— moping, dejected, self- 
willed, and as if surrounded with some perplexing circumstances. 
Though I visit him pretty frequently for short intervals, I say very 
little to his affairs, not choosing to be a party concerned, especially 
in cases of so critical and tender a nature. There is much mystery in 
almost all his temporal affairs, as well as in many of his speculative 
theories. Whoever lives in this neighborhood to see his exit will 
probably see and hear some very strange things. Time will show ; — 
I am afraid, not greatly to his credit. There is thought to be an 
irremovable obstruction to his happiness within his walls, as well as another 
without them ; but the former is the more powerful, and like to con- 
tinue so. He has this day been trying anew to engage me to stay 
with him. No lucrative views can tempt me to sacrifice my liberty 
or my health, to such measures as are proposed here. Nor do Hike to 



WOItLULINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLIKESS. 225 

have to do with persons whose word and honor cannot he depended on. So 
much for this very odd and unhappy topic." 

In August Mr. Jones's lone is slightly modified. Earnest 
entreaties, not lucrative considerations, have induced him to 
cheer the Doctor's dejected heart by remaining at Welwyn 
some time longer. The Doctor is, " in various respects, a very 
unhappy man," and few know so much of these respects as 
Mr. Jones. In September he recurs to the subject : 

" My ancient gentleman here is still full of trouble, which moves 
my concern, though it moves only the secret laughter of many, and 
some untoward surmises in disfavor of him and his household. The 
loss of a very large sum of money (about 200Z.) is talked of ; whereof 
this vill and neighborhood is full. Some disbelieve ; others says, ' It 
is no wonder, where about eighteen or more servants are sometimes taken 
and dismissed in the course of a year.' The gentleman himself is 
allowed by all to be far more harmless and easy in his family than 
some one else who hath too much the lead in it. This, among 
others, was one reason for my late motion to quit." 

No other mention of Young's affairs occurs until April 2d, 
1765, when he says that Dr. Young is very ill, attended by 
two physicians. 

" Having mentioned this young gentleman (Dr. Young's son), I 
would acquaint you next, that he came hither this morning, having 
been sent for, as I am told, by the direction of Mrs. Hallows. In- 
deed, she intimated to me as much herself. And if this be so, I 
must say, that it is one of the most prudent acts she ever did, or 
could have done in such a case as this ; as it may prove a means of 
preventing much confusion after the death of the Doctor. I have had 
some little discourse with the son : he seems much affected, and I 
believe really is so. He earnestly wishes his father might be pleased 
to ask after him ; for you must know he has not yet done this, nor is, 
in my opinion, like to do it. And it has been said farther, that upon 
a late application made to him on the behalf of his son, he desired 
that no more might be said to him about it. How true this may be 
I cannot as yet be certain ; all I shall say is, it seems not improba- 
ble ... I heartily wish the ancient man's heart may prove tender 
toward his son ; though, knowing him so well, 1 can scarce hope to hear 
such desirable news.*' 



226 THE ESSAYS OE " GEORGE ELIOT." 

Eleven days later he writes : 

" I have now the pleasure to acquaint you, that the late Dr. Young, 
though he had for many years kept his son at a distance from him, 
yet has now at last left him all his possessions, after the payment of 
certain legacies ; so that the young gentleman (who bears a fair char- 
acter, and behaves well, as far as I can hear or see) will. I hope, soon 
enjoy and make a prudent use of a handsome fortune. The father, 
on his deathbed, and since my return from London, was applied to 
in the tenderest manner, by one of his physicians, and by another 
person, to admit the son into his presence, to make submission, in- 
treat forgiveness, and obtain his blessing. As to an interview with 
his son, he intimated that he chose to decline it, as his spirits were 
then low and his nerves weak. With regard to the next particular, 
he said, ' I heartily forgive him ; ' and upon mention of this last, he 
gently lifted up his hand, and letting it gently fall, pronounced these 
words, ' God bless him ! * . . . I know it will give you pleasure to 
be farther informed that he was pleased to make respectful mention 
of me in his will ; expressing his satisfaction in my care of his par- 
ish, bequeathing to me a handsome legacy, and appointing me to be one 
of his executors." 

So far Mr. Jones, in his confidential correspondence with 
a " friend, who may be trusted." In a letter communicated 
apparently by him to the Gentleman's Magazine, seven years 
later, namely, in 1782, on the appearance of Croft's biography 
of Young, we find him speaking of " the ancient gentleman" 
in a tone of reverential eulogy, quite at variance with the free 
comments we have just quoted. But the Rev. John Jones was 
probably of opinion, with Mrs. Montagu, whose contemporary 
and retrospective letters are also set in a different key, that 
" the interests of religion were connected with the character of 
a man so distinguished for piety as Dr. Young." At all 
events, a subsequent quasi- official statement weighs nothing as 
evidence against contemporary, spontaneous, and confidential 
hints. 

To Mrs. Hallows, Young left a legacy of £1000, with the 
request that she would destroy all his manuscripts. This final 
request, from some unknown cause, was not complied with, 
and among the papers he left behind him was the following 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLIKESS. 227 

letter from Archbishop Seeker, which probably marks the date 
of his latest effort after preferment : 

" Deanery of St. Paul's, July 8, 1758. 
" Good Dr. Young : I have long wondered that more suitable notice 
of your great merit hath not been taken by persons in power. But 
how to remedy the omission I see not. No encouragement hath ever 
been given me to mention things of this nature to his Majesty. And 
therefore, in all likelihood, the only consequence of doing it would 
be weakening the little influence which else I may possibly have on 
some other occasions. Your fortune and your reputation set you above 
the need of advancement ; and your sentiments above that concern for it, on 
your own account, which, on that of the public, is sincerely felt by 

" Your loving Brother, 

" Tho. Cant." 

The loving brother's irony is severe ! 

Perhaps the least questionable testimony to the better side 
of Young's character is that of Bishop Hildesley, who, as the 
vicar of a parish near Welwyn, had been Young's neighbor for 
upward of twenty years. The affection of the clergy for each 
other, we have observed, is, like that of the fair sex, not at all 
of a blind and infatuated kind ; and we may therefore the 
rather believe them when they give each other any extra-official 
praise. Bishop Hildesley, then writing of Young to Richard- 
son, says : 

" The impertinence of my frequent visits to him was amply re- 
warded ; forasmuch as, I can truly say, he never received me but 
with agreeable open complacency ; and I never left him but with 
profitable pleasure and improvement. He was one or other, the 
most modest, the most patient of contradiction, and the most in- 
forming and entertaining I ever conversed with — at least, of any man 
who had so just pretensions to pertinacity and reserve." 

Mr. Langton, however, who was also a frequent visitor of 
Young's, informed Bos well — 

" That there was an air of benevolence in his manner ; but £hat he 
could obtain from him less information than he had hoped to receive 
from one who had lived so much in intercourse with the brightest 



228 THE ESSAYS OF 

men of what had been called the Augustan age of England ; and that 
he showed a degree of eager curiosity concerning the common occur- 
rences that were then passing, which appeared somewhat remarkable 
in a man of such intellectual stores, of such an advanced age, and 
who had retired from life with declared disappointment in his ex- 
pectations." 

The same substance, we know, will exhibit different qualities 
under different tests ; and, after all, imperfect reports of 
individual impressions, whether immediate or traditional, are 
a very frail basis on which to build our opinion of a man. 
One's character may be very indifferently mirrored in the mind 
of the most intimate neighbor ; it all depends on the quality 
of that gentleman's reflecting surface. 

But, discarding any inferences from such uncertain evidence, 
the outline of Young's character is too distinctly traceable in 
the well-attested facts of his life, and yet more in the self- 
betrayal that runs through all his works, for us to fear that our 
general estimate of him may be false. For, while no poet 
seems less easy and spontaneous than Young, no poet discloses 
himself more completely. Men's minds have no hiding-place 
out of themselves — their affectations do but betray another 
phase of their nature. And if, in the present view of Young, 
we seem to be more intent on laying bare unfavorable facts 
than on shrouding them in "charitable speeches," it is not 
because we have any irreverential pleasure in turning men's 
characters ' ' the seamy side without, ' ' but because we see no 
great advantage in considering a man as he was not. Young's 
biographers and critics have usually set out from the position 
that he was a great religious teacher, and that his poetry is 
morally sublime ; and they have toned down his failings into 
harmony with their conception of the divine and the poet. For 
our own part, we set out from precisely the opposite convic- 
tion — namely, that the religious and moral spirit of Young's 
poetry is low and false, and we think it of some importance to 
show that the " Night Thoughts" are the reflex of the mind in 
which the higher human sympathies were inactive. This 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 229 

judgment is entirely opposed to our youthful predilections and 
enthusiasm. The sweet garden-breath of early enjoyment 
lingers about many a page of the " Night Thoughts," and even 
of the " Last Day," giving an extrinsic charm to passages of 
stilted rhetoric and false sentiment ; but the sober and repeated 
reading of maturer years has convinced us that it would hardly 
be possible to find a more typical instance than Young's 
poetry, of the mistake which substitutes interested obedience 
for sympathetic emotion, and baptizes egoism as religion. 

Pope said of Young, that he had " much of a sublime genius 
without common-sense." The deficiency Pope meant to 
indicate was, we imagine, moral rather than intellectual : it 
was the want of that fine sense of what is fitting in speech and 
action, which is often eminently possessed by men and women 
whose intellect is of a very common order, but who have the . 
sincerity and dignity which can never coexist with the selfish 
preoccupations of vanity or interest. This was the " common- 
sense" in which Young was conspicuously deficient ; and it 
was partly owing to this deficiency that his genius, waiting to 
be determined by the highest prize, fluttered uncertainly from 
effort to effort, until, when he was more than sixty, it suddenly 
spread its broad wing, and soared so as to arrest the gaze of 
other generations besides his own. For he had no versatility 
of faculty to mislead him. The " Night Thoughts" only differ 
from his previous works in the degree and not in the kind of 
power they manifest. Whether he writes prose or poetry, 
rhyme or blank verse, dramas, satires, odes, or meditations, 
we see everywhere the same Young — the same narrow circle of 
thoughts, the same love of abstractions, the same telescopic view 
of human things, the same appetency toward antithetic apo- 
thegm and rhapsodic climax. The passages that arrest us in his 
tragedies are those in which he anticipates some fine passage in 
the " Night Thoughts," and where his characters are only 
transparent shadows through which we see the bewigged embon- 
point of the didactic poet, excogitating epigrams or ecstatic 



230 THE ESSAYS OF 



soliloquies by the light of a candle fixed in a skull. Thus, in 

" The Revenge, " "Alonzo,"in the conflict of jealousy and 

love that at once urges and forbids him to murder his wife, 

says : 

' ' This vast and solid earth, that blazing sun, 
Those skies, through which it rolls, must all have end. 
What then is man ? The smallest part of nothing. 
Day buries day ; month, month ; and year the year ! 
Our life is but a chain of many deaths. 
Can then Death's self be feared ? Our life much rather : 
Life is the desert, life the solitude ; 
Death joins us to the great majority ; 
'Tis to be born to Plato and to Caesar ; 
'Tis to be great forever ; 
'Tis pleasure, 'tis ambition, then, to die." 

His prose writings all read like the " Night Thoughts," 
either diluted into prose or not yet crystallized into poetry. 
For example, in his " Thoughts for Age," he says : 

' s Though we stand on its awful brink, such our leaden bias to the 
world, we turn our faces the wrong way ; we are still looking on our 
old acquaintance, Time ; though now so wasted and reduced, that we 
can see little more of him than his wings and his scythe : our age 
enlarges his wings to our imagination ; and our fear of death, his 
scythe ; as Time himself grows less. His consumption is deep ; his 
annihilation is at hand." 

This is a dilution of the magnificent image — 

" Time in advance behind him hides his wings, 
And seems to creep decrepit with his age. 
Behold him when past by ! What then is seen 
But his proud pinions, swifter than the winds ?' ' 

Again : 

" A requesting Omnipotence ? What can stun and confound thy 
reason more ? What more can ravish and exalt thy heart ? It cannot 
but ravish and exalt ; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex 
thee, to take in all that suggests. Thou child of the dust ! Thou 
speck of misery and sin ! How abject thy weakness ! how great is 
thy power ! Thou crawler on earth, and possible (I was about to 
say) controller of the skies ! Weigh, and weigh well, the wondrous 
truths I have in view : which cannot be weighed too much ; which 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS. 231 

the more they are weighed, amaze the more ; which to have sup- 
posed, before they were revealed, would have been as great madness, 
and to have presumed on as great sin, as it is now madness and sin 
not to believe." 

Even in his Pindaric odes, in which he made the most violent 
efforts against nature, he is still neither more nor less than the 
Young of the '* Last Day," emptied and swept of his genius, 
and possessed by seven demons of fustian and bad rhyme. 
Even here his " Ercles' Vein" alternates with his moral plati- 
tudes, and we have the perpetual text of the " Night Thoughts:" 

" Gold pleasure buys ; 

But pleasure dies, 
For soon the gross fruition cloys ; 

Though raptures court, 

The sense is short ; 
But virtue kindles living joys ; — 

" Joys felt alone ! 

Joys asked of none ! 
"Which Time's and fortune's arrows miss : 

Joys that subsist, 

Though fates resist, 
An unprecarious, endless bliss ! 

"Unhappy they ! 

And falsely gay ! 
Who bask forever in success ; 

A constant feast 

Quite palls the taste, 
And long enjoyment is distress." 

In the " Last Day," again, which is the earliest thing he 
wrote, we have an anticipation of all his greatest faults and 
merits. Conspicuous among the faults is that attempt to exalt 
our conceptions of Deity by vulgar images and comparisons, 
which is so offensive in the later " Night Thoughts. " In a 
burst of prayer and homage to God, called forth by the contem- 
plation of Christ coming to judgment, he asks, Who brings the 
change of the seasons ? and answers : 

li Not the great Ottoman, or Greater Czar ; 
Not Europe's arbitress of peace and war ! 



232 THE ESSAYS OF 

Conceive the soul in its most solemn moments, assuring God 
that it doesn't place his power below that of Louis Napoleon or 
Queen Victoria ! 

But in the midst of uneasy rhymes, inappropriate imagery, 
vaulting sublimity that o'erleaps itself, and vulgar emotions, we 
have in this poem an occasional flash of genius, a touch of 
simple grandeur, which promises as much as Young ever 
achieved. Describing the on-coming of the dissolution of all 
things, he says : 

" No sun in radiant glory shines on high ; 
No light bid from the terrors of the sky." 

And again, speaking of great armies : 

" Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn 
Rous' d the broad front, and call' d the battle on." 

And this wail of the lost souls is fine : 

" And this for sin ? 
Could I offend if I had never been ? 
But still increas'd the senseless, happy mass, 
Flow'd in the stream, or shiver 'd in the grass ? 
Father of mercies ! "Why from silent earth 
Didst thou awake and curse me into birth ? 
Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night, 
And make a thankless present of thy light ? 
Push into being a reverse of Thee, 
And animate a clod with misery . ? " 

But it is seldom in Young's rhymed poems that the effect of 
a felicitous thought or image is not counteracted by our sense 
of the constraint he suffered from the necessities of rhyme 
— that "Gothic demon," as he afterward called it, "which, 
modern poetry tasting, became mortal." In relation to his 
own power, no one will question the truth of this dictum, 
that " blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst ; verse reclaim- 
ed, reinthroned in the true language of the gods ; who never 
thundered nor suffered their Homer to thunder in rhyme. " 
His want of mastery in rhyme is especially a drawback on the 
effects of his Satires ; for epigrams and witticisms are pecul- 
iarly susceptible to the intrusion of a superfluous word, or to an 
inversion which implies constraint. Here, even more than else- 



WORLDLINESS A^D OTHER-WORLD1LKTES8. 233 

where, the art that conceals art is an absolute requisite, and to 
have a witticism presented to us in limping or cumbrous 
rhythm is as counteractive to any electrifying effect as to see 
the tentative grimaces by which a comedian prepares a gro- 
tesque countenance. AVe discern the process, instead of being 
startled by the result. 

This is one reason why the Satires, read seriatim, have a flat- 
ness to us, which, when we afterward read picked passages, we 
are inclined to disbelieve in, and to attribute to some deficiency 
in our own mood. Bat there are deeper reasons for that dis- 
satisfaction. Young is not a satirist of a high order, His 
satire has neither the terrible vigor, the lacerating energy of 
genuine indignation, nor the humor which owns loving fellow- 
ship with the poor human nature it laughs at ; nor yet the per- 
sonal bitterness which, as in Pope's characters of Sporus and 
Atticus, insures those living touches by virtue of which the in- 
dividual and particular in Art becomes the universal and immor- 
tal. Young could never describe a real, complex human 
being ; but what he could do with eminent success was to de- 
scribe, with neat and finished point, obvious types, of manners 
rather than of character — to write cold and clever epigrams on 
personified vices and absurdities. There is no more emotion 
in his satire than if he were turning witty verses on a waxen 
image of Cupid or a lady's glove. He has none of these felici- 
tious epithets, none of those pregnant lines, by which Pope's 
Satires have enriched the ordinary speech of educated men. 
Young's wit will be found in almost every instance to consist in 
that antithetic combination of ideas which, of all the forms of 
wit, is most within reach of a clever effort. In his gravest ar- 
guments, as well as in his lightest satire, one might imagine that 
he had set himself to work out the problem, how much anti- 
thesis might be got out of a given subject, And there he com- 
pletely succeeds. His neatest portraits are all wrought on this 
plan. " Narcissus," for example, who 

" Omits no duty ; nor can Envy say 

He miss" d, these many years, the Church or Play : 



2M THE ESSAYS OF "GEOKGE ELIOT. 



He makes no noise in Parliament, 'tis true ; 

But pays his debts, and visit when 'tis due ; 

His character and gloves are ever clean, 

And then he can out-bow the bowing Dean ; 

A smile eternal on his lrp he wears, 

Which equally the wise and worthless shares. 

In gay fatigues, this most undaunted chief, 

Patient of idleness beyond belief, 

Most charitably lends the town his face 

For ornament in every public place ; 

As sure as cards he to th' assembly comes', 

And is the furniture of drawing-rooms : 

"When Ombre calls, his hand and heart are free, 

And, joined to two, he fails not — to make three ; 

Narcissus is the glory of his race ; 

For who does nothing with a better grace ? 

To deck my list by nature were designed 

Such shining expletives of human kind, 

Who want, while through blank life they dream along, 

Sense to be right and passion to be wrong." 

It is but seldom that we find a touch of that easy slyness 
which gives an additional zest to surprise ; but here is an 
instance : 

" See Tityrus, with merriment possest, 

Is burst with laughter ere he hears the jest, 
What need he stay, for when the joke is o'er, 
His teeth will be no whiter than before." 

Like Pope, whom he imitated, he sets out with a psycholog- 
ical mistake as the basis of his satire, attributing all forms of 
folly to one passion — the love of fame, or vanity — a much 
grosser mistake, indeed, than Pope's, exaggeration of the 
extent to which the " ruling passion" determines conduct in 
the individual. Not that Young is consistent in his mistake. 
He sometimes implies no more than what is the truth — that 
the love of fame is the cause, not of all follies, but of many. 

Young's satires on women are superior to Pope's, which is 
only saying that they are superior to Pope's greatest failure. 
We can more frequently pick out a couplet as successful than 
an entire sketch. Of the too emphatic " Syrena" he says : 

" Her judgment just, her sentence is too strong ; 
Because she's right, she's ever in the wrong." 



Of the diplomatic " Julia :" 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS. 235 



" For her own breakfast she'll project a scheme, 
Nor take her tea without a stratagem. " 

Of " Lyce, " the old painted coquette : 

" In vain the cock has summoned sprites away ; 
She walks at noon and blasts the bloom of day." 

Of the nymph, who, " gratis, clears religious mysteries :" 

" 'Tis hard, too, she who makes no use but chat 
Of her religion, should be barr'd in that." 

The description of the literary belle, " Daphne," well pref- 
aces that of " Stella," admired by Johnson : 

" With legs toss'd high, on her sophee she sits, 
Vouchsafing audience to contending wits : 
Of each performance she's the final test ; 
One act read o'er, she prophecies the rest ; 
And then, pronouncing with decisive air, 
Fully convinces all the town— she's fair. 
Had lonely Daphne Hecatessa' s face, 
How would her elegance of taste decrease ! 
Some ladies' judgment in their features lies, 
And all their genius sparkles in their eyes. 
But hold, she cries, lampooner ! have a care ; 
Must I want common sense because I'm fair? 
O no ; see Stella : her eyes shine as bright 
As if her tongue was never in the right ; 
And yet what real learning, judgment, fire ! 
She seems inspir'd, and can herself inspire. 
How then (if malice ruled not all the fair) 
Could Daphne publish, and could she forbear ?" 

After all, when we have gone through Young's seven Satires, 
we seem to have made but an indifferent meal. They are a 
sort of fricassee, with some little solid meat in them, and yet 
the flavor is not always piquant. It is curious to find him, 
when he pauses a moment from his satiric sketching, recurring 
to his old platitudes : 

" Can gold calm passion, or make reason shine ? 
Can we dig peace or wisdom from the mine ? 
Wisdom to gold prefer ;" — 

platitudes which he seems inevitably to fall into, for the same 
reason that some men are constantly asserting their contempt 
for criticism — because he felt the opposite so keenly. 



236 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

The outburst of genius in the earlier books of the " Night 
Thoughts" is the more remarkable, that in the interval be- 
tween them and the Satires he had produced nothing but 
his Pindaric odes, in which he fell far below the level of his 
previous works. Two sources of this sudden strength were the 
freedom of blank verse and the presence of a genuine emotion. 
Most persons, in speaking of the ' ' Night Thoughts, ' ' have in 
their minds only the two or three first Nights, the majority of 
readers rarely getting beyond these, unless, as Wilson says, 
they u have but few books, are poor, and live in the country. " 
And in these earlier Nights there is enough genuine sublimity 
and genuine sadness to bribe as into too favorable a judgment 
of them as a whole. Young had only a very few things to say 
or sing — such as that life is vain, that death is imminent, that 
man is immortal, that virtue is wisdom, that friendship is 
sweet, and that the source of virtue is the contemplation of 
death and immortality — and even in his two first Nights he had 
said almost all he had to say in his finest manner. Through 
these first outpourings of " complaint" we feel that the poet is 
really sad, that the bird is singing over a rifled nest ; and we 
bear with his morbid picture of the world and of life, as the 
Job-like lament of a man whom ' ' the hand of God hath 
touched." Death has carried away his best-beloved, and that 
" silent land " whither they are gone has more reality for the 
desolate one than this world which is empty of their love : 

" This is the desert, this the solitude ; 
How populous, how vital is the grave I" 

Joy died with the loved one : 

' ' The disenchanted earth 
Lost all her lustre. Where her glitt'ring towers ? 
Her golden mountains, where ? All darken'd down 
To naked waste ; a dreary vale of tears : 
The great magician's dead/" 

Under the pang of parting, it seems to the bereaved man as 
if love were only a nerve to suffer with, and he sickens at the 
thought of every joy of which he must one day say — " it 



WOHLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 237 

was. " In its unreasoning anguish, the soul rushes to the idea 
of perpetuity as the one element of bliss : 

i ' O ye blest scenes of permanent delight ! — 
Could ye, so rich in rapture, fear an end, — 
That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy, 
And quite unparadise the realms of light." 

In a man under the immediate pressure of a great sorrow, 
we tolerate morbid exaggerations ; we are prepared to see 
him turn away a weary eye from sunlight and flowers and 
sweet human faces, as if this rich and glorious life had no 
significance but as a preliminary of death ; we do not criticise 
his views, we compassionate his feelings. And so it is with 
Young in these earlier Nights. There is already some artificial- 
ity even in his grief, and feeling often slides into rhetoric, but 
through it all we are thrilled with the unmistakable cry of pain, 
which makes us tolerant of egoism and hyperbole : 

"In every varied posture, place, and hour, 
How widow' d every thought of every joy ! 
Thought, busy thought ! too busy for my peace ! 
Through the dark postern of time long elapsed 
Led softly, by the stillness of the night, — 
Led like a murderer (and such it proves !) 
Strays (wretched rover !) o'er the pleasing past, — 
In quest of wretchedness, perversely strays ; 
And finds all desert now ; and meets the ghosts 
Of my departed joys." 

But when he becomes didactic, rather then complaining — 
when he ceases to sing his sorrows, and begins to insist on his 
opinions — when that distaste for life which we pity as a 
transient feeling is thrust upon us as a theory, we become 
perfectly cool and critical, and are not in the least inclined to 
be indulgent to false views and selfish sentiments. 

Seeing that we are about to be severe on Young's failings 
and failures, we ought, if a reviewer's space were elastic, to 
dwell also on his merits — on the startling vigor of his imagery 
— on the occasional grandeur of his thought — on the piquant 
force of that grave satire into which his meditations continually 
run. But, since our " limits" are rigorous, we must content 
ourselves with the less agreeable half of the critic's duty ; and 



SJ38 THE ESSAYS OF " GEOUGE ELIOT." 

we may the rather do so, because it would be difficult to say 
anything new of Young, in the way of admiration, while we 
think there are many salutary lessons remaining to be drawn 
from his faults. 

One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his 
radical insincerity as a poetic artist. This, added to the thin 
and artificial texture of his wit, is the true explanation of the 
paradox — that a poet who is often inopportunely witty has 
the opposite vice of bombastic absurdity. The source of all 
grandiloquence is the want of taking for a criterion the true 
qualities of the object described or the emotion expressed. 
The grandiloquent man is never bent on saying what he feels or 
what he sees, but on producing a certain effect on his audience ; 
hence he may float away into utter inanity without meeting any 
criterion to arrest him. Here lies the distinction between 
grandiloquence and genuine fancy or bold imaginativeness. 
The fantastic or the boldly imaginative poet may be as sincere as 
the most realistic : he is true to his own sensibilities or inward 
vision, and in his wildest flights he never breaks loose from his 
criterion — the truth of bis own mental state. Now, this dis- 
ruption of language from genuine thought and feeling is what 
we are constantly detecting in Young ; and his insincerity is 
the more likely to betray him into absurdity, because he habit- 
ually treats of abstractions, and not of concrete objects or 
specific emotions. He descants perpetually on virtue, religion, 
"' the good man,'-' life, death, immortality, eternity — subjects 
which are apt to give a factitious grandeur to empty wordiness. 
When a poet floats in the empyrean, and only takes a bird's- 
eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere fact of his 
soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for 
proximity to heaven. Thus : 

" His hand the good man fixes on the skies, 
And bids earth roll, nor feels her idle whirl," 

may, perhaps, pass for sublime with some readers. But pause 
a moment to realize the image, and the monstrous absurdity of 
a man's grasping the skies, and hanging habitually suspended 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLItfESS. 239 

there, while he contemptuously bids the earth roll, warns you 

that no genuine feeling could have suggested so unnatural a 

conception. 

Again, 

" See the man immortal : him, I mean, 
Who lives as such ; whose heart, full bent on Heaven, 
Leans all that way, his bias to the stars." 

This is worse than the previous example : for you can at 
least form some imperfect conception of a man hanging from 
the skies, though the position strikes you as uncomfortable 
and of no particular use ; but you are utterly unable to imagine 
how his heart can lean toward the stars. Examples of such 
vicious imagery, resulting from insincerity, may be found, 
perhaps, in almost every page of the ' ' Night Thoughts. ' ' 
But simple assertions or aspirations, undisguised by imagery, 
are often equally false. No writer whose rhetoric was checked 
by the slightest truthful intentions could have said — 

" An eye of awe and wonder let me roll, 
And roll forever." 

Abstracting the more poetical associations with the eye, this 

is hardly less absurd than if he had wished to stand forever 

with his mouth open. 

Again : 

" Far beneath 
A soul immortal is a mortal joy." 

Happily for human nature, we are sure no man really believes 
that. Which of us has the impiety not to feel that our souls 
are only too narrow for the joy of looking into the trusting 
eyes of our children, of reposing on the love of a husband or 
a wife — nay, of listening to the divine voice of music, or 
watching the calm brightness of autumnal afternoons ? But 
Young could utter this falsity without detecting it, because, 
when he spoke of " mortal joys," he rarely had in his mind 
any object to which he could attach sacredness. He was 
thinking of bishoprics, and benefices, of smiling monarchs, 
patronizing prime ministers, and a "much indebted muse." 



240 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

Of anything between these and eternal bliss he was but rarely 
and moderately conscious. Often, indeed, he sinks very much 
below even the' bishopric, and seems to have no notion of 
earthly pleasure but such as breathes gaslight and the fumes of 
wine. His picture of life is precisely such as you would 
expect from a man who has risen from his bed at two o'clock in 
the afternoon with a headache and a dim remembrance that he 
has added to his " debts of honor :" 

" What wretched repetition cloys us here ! 
What periodic potions for the sick, 
Distemper'd bodies, and disteinper'd minds?" 

And then he flies off to his usual antithesis : 

" In an eternity what scenes shall strike ! 
Adventures thicken, novelties surprise !' ' 

" Earth" means lords and levees, duchesses and Dalilahs, 
South-Sea dreams, and illegal percentage ; and the only things 
distinctly preferable to these are eternity and the stars. De- 
prive Young of this antithesis, and more than half his eloquence 
would be shrivelled up. Place him on a breezy common, 
where the furze is in its golden bloom, where children are play- 
ing, and horses are standing in the sunshine with fondling necks, 
and he would have nothing to say. Here are neither depths of 
guilt nor heights of glory ; and we doubt whether in such a 
scene he would be able to pay his usual compliment to the 
Creator : * 

" Where'er I turn, what claim on all applause !" 

It is true that he sometimes — not often — speaks of virtue as 
capable of sweetening life, as well as of taking the sting from 
death and winning heaven ; and, lest we should be guilty of 
any unfairness to him, we will quote the two passages which 
convey this sentiment the most explicitly. In the one he 
gives " Lorenzo" this excellent recipe for obtainiug cheerful- 
ness ; 

" Go, fix some weighty truth ; 

Chain down some passion ; do some generous good ; 

Teach Ignorance to see, or Grief to smile ; 



WORLDLINESS AND OTBZER-WORLDLINESS. 241 

Correct thy friend ; befriend thy greatest foe ; 

Or, with warm heart, and confidence divine, 

Spring up, and lay strong hold on Him who made thee." 

The other passage is vague, but beautiful, and its music has 
murmured in our minds for many years : 

' ' The cuckoo seasons sing 
The same dull note to such as nothing prize 
But what those seasons from the teeming earth 
To doting sense indulge. But nobler minds, 
Which relish fruit unripened by the sun, 
Make their days various ; various as the d} T es 
On the dove's neck, which wanton in his rays. 
On minds of dove-like innocence possess'd, 
On lighten'd minds that bask in Virtue's beams, 
Nothing hangs tedious, nothing old revolves 
In that for which they long, for which they live. 
Their glorious efforts, winged with heavenly hopes, 
Each rising morning sees still higher rise ; 
Each bounteous dawn its novelty presents 
To worth maturing, new strength, lustre, fame ; 
While Nature's circle, like a chariot wheel, 
Rolling beneath their elevated aims, 
Makes their fair prospect fairer every hour ; 
Advancing virtue in a line to bliss. " 

Even here, where he is in his most amiable mood, you see at 

what a telescopic distance he stands from mother Earth and 

simple human joys — " Nature's circle rolls beneath." Indeed, 

we remember no mind in poetic literature that seems to have 

absorbed less of the beauty and the healthy breath of the 

common landscape than Young's. His images, often grand 

and finely presented — witness that sublimely sudden leap of 

thought, 

' ' Embryos we must be till we burst the shell, 
Yon ambient azure shell, and spring to life' ' — 

lie almost entirely within that circle of observation which would 
be familiar to a man who lived in town, hung about the 
theatres, read the newspaper, and went home often by moon 
and starlight. 

There is no natural object nearer than the moon that seems 
to have any strong attraction for him, and even to the moon he 
chiefly appeals for patronage, and " pays his court" to her. 
It is reckoned among the many deficiencies of " Lorenzo" 



242 THE ESSAYS OF 

that he "never asked the moon one question" — an omission 

which Young thinks eminently unbecoming a rational being. 

He describes nothing so well as a comet, and is tempted to 

linger with fond detail over nothing more familiar than the day 

of judgment and an imaginary journey among the stars. Once 

on Saturn's ring he feels at home, and his language becomes 

quite easy : 

' ' What behold I now ? 
A wilderness of wonders lemming round, 
Where larger suns inhabit higher spheres ; 
Perhaps the villas of descending gods /" 

It is like a sudden relief from a strained posture when, in 
the " Night Thoughts, " we come on any allusion that carries 
us to the lanes, woods, or fields. Such allusions are amaz- 
ingly rare, and we could almost count them on a single hand. 
That we may do him no injustice, we will quote the three best : 

" Like blossom' d trees overturned by vernal storm, 
Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay. 
***** 

" In the same brook none ever bathed him twice : 
To the same life none ever twice awoke. 
We call the brook the same— the same we think 
Our life, though still more rapid in its flow ; 
Nor mark the much irrevocably lapsed 
And mingled with the sea." 
***** 

" The crown of manhood is a winter joy ; 
An evergreen that stands the northern blast, 
And blossoms in the rigor of our fate. ' ' 

The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of 
abstractions, is closely allied in Young to the want of genuine 
emotion. He sees virtue sitting on a mount serene, far 
above the mists and storms of earth ; he sees Religion coming 
down from the skies, with this world in her left hand and the 
other world in her right ; but we never find him dwelling on 
virtue or religion as it really exists — in the emotions of a man 
dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his fireside of an 
evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little 
daughter, in courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the 



W0RLDLINES3 AND OTHER- WORLDLItfESS. 243 

internal triumph of justice and pity over personal resentment, 
in all the sublime self-renunciation and sweet charities which 
are found in the details of ordinary life. Now, emotion links 
itself with particulars, and only in a faint and secondary 
manner with abstractions. An orator may discourse very elo- 
quently on injustice in general, and leave his audience cold ; 
but let him state a special case of oppression, and every heart 
will throb. The most untheoretic persons are aware of this 
relation between true emotion and particular facts, as opposed 
to general terms, and implicitly recognize it in the repulsion 
they feel toward any one who professes strong feeling about 
abstractions — in the interjectional " Humbug !" which im- 
mediately rises to their lips. Wherever abstractions appear to 
excite strong emotion, this occurs in men of active intellect and 
imagination, in whom the abstract term rapidly and vividly 
calls up the particulars it represents, these particulars being the 
true source of the emotion ; and such men, if they wished to 
express their feeling, would be infallibly prompted to the 
presentation of details. Strong emotion can no more be 
directed to generalities apart from particulars, than skill in 
figures can be directed to arithmetic apart from numbers. 
Generalities are the refuge at once of deficient intellectual 
activity and deficient feeling. 

If we except the passages in " Philander, " " Narcissa," and 
" Lucia," there is hardly a trace of human sympathy, of self- 
forgetf ulness in the joy or sorrow of a fellow-being, throughout 
this long poem, which professes to treat the various phases of 
man's destiny. And even in the " Narcissa" Night, Young 
repels us by the low moral tone of his exaggerated lament. 
This married step -daughter died at Lyons, and, being a Prot- 
estant, was denied burial, so that her friends had to bury her 
in secret — one of the many miserable results of superstition, but 
not a fact to throw an educated, still less a Christian man, into 
a fury of hatred and vengeance, in contemplating it after the 
lapse of five years. Young, however, takes great pains to 
simulate a bad feeling : 



244 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT. 



" Of grief 
And indignation rival bursts I pour'd, 
Half execration mingled with rny pray'r ; 
Kindled at man, while I his God adored ; 
Sore grudg'd the savage land her sacred dust ; 
Stamp 'd the cursed soil ; and with humanity 
(Denied Narcissa) voisKd them all a grave." 

The odiously bad taste of this last clause makes us hope that 
it is simply a platitude, and not intended as witticism, until he 
removes the possibility of this favorable doubt by immediately 
asking, " Flows my resentment into guilt ?" 

When, by an afterthought, he attempts something like sym- 
pathy, he only betrays more clearly his want of it. Thus, in 
the first Night, when he turns from his private griefs to de- 
pict earth as a hideous abode of misery for all mankind, and 

asks, 

" What then am I, who sorrow for myself ?" 

he falls at once into calculating the benefit of sorrowing for 

others : 

' ' More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts ; 
And conscious virtue mitigates the pang. 
Nor virtue, more than prudence, bids me give 
Swollen thought a second channel." 

This remarkable negation of sympathy is in perfect con- 
sistency with Young's theory of ethics : 

" Virtue is a crime, 
A crime of reason, if it costs us pain 
Unpaid." 

If there is no immortality for man — 

" Sense ! take the rein ; blind Passion, drive us on ; 
And Ignorance ! befriend us on our way. . . 
Yes ; give the pulse full empire ; live the Brute, 
Since as the brute we die. The sum of man, 
Of godlike man, to revel and to rot." 

* * * * * 

" If this life's gain invites him to the deed, 
Why not his country sold, his father slain ?" 
***** 
" Ambition, avarice, by the wise disdain'd, 
Is perfect wisdom, while mankind are fools, 
And think a turf or tombstone covers all.' ' 
***** 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS. 245 

" Die for thy country, thou romantic fool ! 

Seize, seize the plank thyself, and let her sink." 
***** 
"As in the dying parent dies the child, 

Virtue with Immortality expires. 

Who tells me he denies his soul immortal, 

Whate'er his boast, has told me he's a knave. 

His duty 'tis to love himself alone. 

Nor care though mankind -perish if he smiles." 

We can imagine the man who " denies his soul immortal/' 
replying, " It is quite possible that you would be a knave, and 
love yourself alone, if it were not for your belief in immortal- 
ity ; but you are not to force upon me what would result from 
your own utter want of moral emotion. I am just and honest, 
not because I expect to live in another world, but because, 
having felt the pain of injustice and dishonesty toward myself, 
I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who would suffer the 
same pain if I were unjust or dishonest toward them. Why 
should I give my neighbor short weight in this world, because 
there is not another world in which I should have nothing to 
weigh out to him ? I am honest, because I don't like to inflict 
evil on others in this life, not because I'm afraid of evil to 
myself in another. The fact is, I do not love myself alone, 
whatever logical necessity there may be for that in your mind. 
I have a tender love for my wife, and children, and friends, 
and through that love I sympathize with like affections in other 
men. It is a pang to me to witness the sufferings of a fellow- 
being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is 
mortal — because his life is so short, and I would have it, if 
possible, filled with happiness and not misery. Through my 
union and fellowship with the men and women I have seen, I 
feel a like, though a fainter, sympathy with those I have not 
seen ; and I am able so to live in imagination with the genera- 
tions to come, that their good is not alien to me, and is a 
stimulus to me to labor for ends which may not benefit myself, 
but will benefit them. It is possible that you may prefer to 
1 live the brute, ' to sell your country, or to slay your father, 
if you were not afraid of some disagreeable consequences from 



246 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

the criminal laws of another world ; but even if I could con- 
ceive no motive but my own worldly interest or the gratification 
of my animal desire, I have not observed that beastliness, treach- 
ery, and parricide are the direct way to happiness and comfort 
on earth. And I should say, that if you feel no motive to com- 
mon morality but your fear of a criminal bar in heaven, you are 
decidedly a man for the police on earth to keep their eye upon, 
since it is matter of world-old experience that fear of distant 
consequences is a very insufficient barrier against the rush of 
immediate desire. Fear of consequences is only one form of 
egoism, which will hardly stand against half a dozen other 
forms of egoism bearing down upon it. And in opposition to 
your theory that a belief in immortality is the only source of 
virtue, I maintain that, so far as moral action is dependent on 
that belief, so far the emotion which prompts it is not truly 
moral — is still in the stage of egoism, and has not yet attained 
the higher development of sympathy. In proportion as a man 
would care less for the rights and welfare of his fellow, if he 
did not believe in a future life, in that proportion is he wanting 
in the genuine feelings of justice and benevolence ; as the 
musician who would care less to play a sonata of Beethoven's 
finely in solitude than in public, where he was to be paid for 
it, is wanting in genuine enthusiasm for music." 

Thus far might answer the man who " denies himself im- 
mortal ;" and, allowing for that deficient recognition of the 
finer and more indirect influences exercised by the idea of 
immortality which might be expected from one who took up a 
dogmatic position on such a subject, we think he would have 
given a sufficient reply to Young and other theological ad- 
vocates who, like him, pique themselves On the loftiness of 
their doctrine when they maintain that " virtue with immortal- 
ity expires." We may admit, indeed, that if the better part 
of virtue consists, as Young appears to think, in contempt for 
mortal joys, in " meditation of our own decease," and in 
" applause" of God in the style of a congratulatory address to 
Her Majesty — all which has small relation to the well-being of 



WORLDLINESS AN"D OTHER- WORLDLINESS. 247 

mankind on this earth — the motive to it must be gathered from 
something that lies quite outside the sphere of human sym- 
pathy. But, for certain other elements of virtue, which are of 
more obvious importance to untheological minds — a delicate 
sense of our neighbor's rights, an active participation in the 
joys and sorrows of our fellow-men, a magnanimous acceptance 
of privation or suffering for ourselves when it is the condition 
of good to others, in a word, the extension and intensification 
of our sympathetic nature — we think it of some importance to 
contend that they have no more direct relation to the belief in 
a future state than the interchange of gases in the lungs has to 
the plurality of worlds. Nay, to us it is conceivable that in 
some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human 
mortality — that we are here for a little while and then vanish 
away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones 
and to our many suffering fellow-men — lies nearer the fountains 
of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence. 
And surely it ought to be a welcome fact, if the thought of 
mortality, as well as of immortality, be favorable to virtue. 
Do writers of sermons and religious novels prefer that men 
should be vicious in order that there may be a more evident 
political and social necessity for printed sermons and clerical 
fictions ? Because learned gentlemen are theological, are we to 
have no more simple honesty and good- will ? We can imagine 
that the proprietors of a patent water-supply have a dread of 
common springs ; but, for our own part, we think there cannot 
be too great a security against a lack of fresh water or of pure 
morality. To us it is a matter of unmixed rejoicing that this 
latter necessary of healthful life is independent of theological 
ink, and that its evolution is insured in the interaction of 
human souls as certainly as the evolution of science or of art, 
with which, indeed, it is but a twin ray, melting into them with 
undefinable limits. 

To return to Young. We can often detect a man's deficien- 
cies in what he admires more clearly than in what he contemns 
— in the sentiments he presents as laudable rather than in those 



248 THE ESSAYS OF 

he decries. And in Young's notion of what is lofty he casts 
a shadow by which we can measure him without further trouble. 
For example, in arguing for human immortality, he says : 

"First, what is true ambition ? The pursuit 

Of glory nothing less them man can share. 

* * * # 

The Visible and Present are for brutes, 
A slender portion, and a narrow bound I 
These Reason, with an energy divine, 
O'erleaps, and claims the Future and Unseen ; 
The vast Unseen, the Future fathomless ! 
When the great soul buoys up to this high point. 
Leaving gross Nature's sediments below, 
Then, and then only, Adam's offspring quits 
The sage and hero of the fields and woods, 
Asserts his rank, and rises into man." 

So, then, if it were certified that, as some benevolent minds 
have tried to infer, our dumb fellow-creatures would share a 
future existence, in which it is to be hoped we should neither 
beat, starve, nor maim them, our ambition for a future life 
would cease to be " lofty !" This is a notion of loftiness 
which may pair off with Dr. Whewell's celebrated observation, 
that Bentham's moral theory is low because it includes justice 
and mercy to brutes. 

But, for a reflection of Young's moral personality on a 
colossal scale, we must turn to those passages where his rhet- 
oric is at its utmost stretch of inflation — where he addresses 
the Deity, discourses of the Divine operations, or describes the 
last judgment. As a compound of vulgar pomp, crawling 
adulation, and hard selfishness, presented under the guise of 
piety, there are few things in literature to surpass the Ninth 
Night, entitled " Consolation," especially in the pages where 
he describes the last judgment — a subject to which, with naive 
self-betrayal, he applies phraseology favored by the exuberant 
penny-a-liner. Thus, when God descends, and the groans of hell 
are opposed by " shouts of joy," much as cheers and groans 
contend at a public meeting where the resolutions are not passed 
unanimously, the poet completes his climax in this way : 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINE8S. 249 



" Hence, in one peal of loud, eternal praise, 
The charmed spectators thunder their applause." 

In the same taste he sings : 

"Eternity, the various sentence past, 
Assigns the sever'd throng distinct abodes, 
Sulphureous or ambrosial." 

Exquisite delicacy of indication ! He is too nice to be 

specific as to the interior of the " sulphureous" abode ; but 

when once half the human race are shut up there, hear how he 

enjoys turning the key on them ! 

" What ensues? 
The deed predominant, the deed of deeds ! 
Which makes a hell of hell, a heaven of heaven! 
The goddess, with determin'd aspect turns 
Her adamantine key's enormous size 
Through Destiny's inextricable wards, 
Deep driving every bolt on both their fates. 
Then, from the crystal battlements of heaven, 
Down, down she hurls it through the dark profound, 
Ten thousand, thoiisand fathom ; there to rust 
And ne'er unlock her resolution more. 
The deep resounds ; and Hell, through all her glooms, 
Returns, in groans, the melancholy roar." 

This is one of the blessings for which Dr. Young thanks 

God " most :" 

" For all I bless thee, most, for the severe ; 
Her death— my own at hand— the fiery gulf, 
That flaming bound of wrath omnipotent 1 
It thunders ; — but it thunders to preserve; 

its wholesome dread 

Averts the dreaded pain ; its hideous groans 

Join Heaven's sweet Hallelujahs in Thy praise, 

Great Source of good alone ! How kind in all ! 

In vengeance kind ! Pain, Death, Gehenna, save". . . 

i.e., save me, Dr. Young, who, in return for that favor, 
promise to give my divine patron the monopoly of that ex- 
uberance in laudatory epithet, of which specimens may be 
seen at any moment in a large number of dedications and odes 
to kings, queens, prime ministers, and other persons of dis- 
tinction. That, in Young's conception, is what God delights 
in. His crowning aim in the " drama" of the ages, is to 
vindicate his own renown. The God of the " Night Thoughts" 



250 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

is simply Young himself " writ large" — a didactic poet, who 
" lectures" mankind in the antithetic hyperbole of mortal and 
immortal joys, earth and the stars, hell and heaven ; and 
expects the tribute of inexhaustible " applause." Young has 
no conception of religion as anything else than egoism turned 
heavenward ; and he does not merely imply this, he insists on 
it. Religion, he tells us, in argumentative passages too long to 
quote, is " ambition, pleasure, and the love of gain," directed 
toward the joys of the future life instead of the present. And 
his ethics correspond to his religion. He vacillates, indeed, in 
his ethical theory, and shifts his position in order to suit his 
immediate purpose in argument ; but he never changes his 
level so as to see beyond the horizon of mere selfishness. 
Sometimes he insists, as we have seen, that the belief in a 
future life is the only basis of morality ; but elsewhere he tells 
us — 

" In self-applause is virtue's golden prize." 

Virtue, with Young, must always squint — must never look 
straight toward the immediate object of its emotion and effort. 
Thus, if a man risks perishing in the snow himself rather than 
forsake a weaker comrade, he must either do this because his 
hopes and fears are directed to another world, or because he 
desires to applaud himself afterward ! Young, if we may 
believe him, would despise the action as folly unless it had 
these motives. Let us hope he was not so bad as he pretended 
to be ! The tides of the divine life in man move under the 
thickest ice of theory. 

Another indication of Young's deficiency in moral, i.e., in 
sympathetic emotion, is his unintermitting habit of pedagogic 
moralizing. On its theoretic and perceptive side, morality 
touches science ; on its emotional side, Art. Now, the prod- 
ucts of Art are great in proportion as they result from that 
immediate prompting of innate power which we call Genius, 
and not from labored obedience to a theory or rule ; and the 
presence of genius or innate prompting is directly opposed to 
the perpetual consciousness of a rule. The action of faculty is 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS. 251 

imperious, and excludes the reflection why it should act. In 
the same way, in proportion as morality is emotional, i.e., has 
affinity with Art, it will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic 
feeling and action, and not as the recognition of a rule. Love 
does not say, " I ought to love " — it loves. Pity does not say, 
" It is right to be pitiful " — it pities. Justice does not say, 
u lam bound to be just" — it feels justly. It is only where 
moral emotion is comparatively weak that the contemplation 
of a rule or theory habitually mingles with its action ; and in 
accordance with this, we think experience, both in literature 
and life, has shown that the minds which are pre-eminently 
didactic — which insist ona" lesson," and despise everything 
that will not convey a moral, are deficient in sympathetic emo- 
tion. A certain poet is recorded to have said that he " wished 
everything of his burned that did not impress some moral ; 
even in love-verses, it might be flung in by the way." What 
poet was it who took this medicinal view of poetry ? Dr. 
Watts, or James Montgomery, or some other singer of spotless 
life and ardent piety ? Not at all. It was Waller. A significant 
fact in relation to our position, that the predominant didactic 
tendency proceeds rather from the poet's perception that it is 
good for other men to be moral, than from any overflow of 
moral feeling in himself. A man who is perpetually thinking 
in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admonition, 
can have little energy left for simple emotion. And this is 
the case with Young. In his highest flights of contemplation 
and his most wailing soliloquies he interrupts himself to fling an 
admonitory parenthesis at " Lorenzo," or to hint that " folly's 
creed " is the reverse of his own. Before his thoughts can 
flow, he must fix his eye on an imaginary miscreant, who gives 
unlimited scope for lecturing, and recriminates just enough to 
keep the spring of admonition and argument going to the 
extent of nine books. It is curious to see how this pedagogic 
habit of mind runs through Young's contemplation of Nature. 
As the tendency to see our own sadness reflected in the external 
world has been called by Mr. Ruskin the " pathetic fallacy," 



252 THE ESSAYS OF 

so we may call Young's disposition to see a rebuke or a warn- 
ing in every natural object, the " pedagogic fallacy." To his 
mind, the heavens are " forever scolding as they shine ;" and 
the great function of the stars is to be a " lecture to mankind." 
The conception of the Deity as a didactic author is not merely 
an implicit point of view with him ; he works it out in elab- 
orate imagery, and at length makes it the occasion of his most 
extraordinary achievement in the " art of sinking," by ex- 
claiming, a propos, we need hardly say, of the nocturnal 
heavens, 

" Divine Instructor ! Thy first volume this 
For man's perusal ! all in capitals !" 

It is this pedagogic tendency, this sermonizing attitude of 
Young's mind, which produces the wearisome monotony of his 
pauses. After the first two or three nights he is rarely sing- 
ing, rarely pouring forth any continuous melody inspired by the 
spontaneous flow of thought or feeling. He is rather occupied 
with argumentative insistance, with hammering in the proofs of 
his propositions by disconnected verses, which he puts down 
at intervals. The perpetual recurrence of the pause at the end 
of the line throughout long passages makes them as fatiguing 
to the ear as a monotonous chant, which consists of the endless 
repetition of one short musical phrase. For example : 

" Past hours, 
If not by guilt, yet wound us by their flight, 
If folly bound our prospect by the grave, 
All feeling of futurity be numb'd, 
All godlike passion for eternals quench 'd, 
All relish of realities expired ; 
Renounced all correspondence with the skies ; 
Our freedom chain'd ; quite wingless our desire ; 
In sense dark-prison' d all that ought-to soar ; 
Prone to the centre ; crawling in the dust ; 
Dismounted every great and glorious aim ; 
Enthralled every faculty divine, 
Heart-buried in the rubbish of the world." 

How different from the easy, graceful melody of Cowper's 
blank verse ! Indeed, it is hardly possible to criticise Young 
without being reminded at every step of the contrast presented 



WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 253 

to him by Cowper. And this contrast urges itself upon us the 
more from the fact that there is, to a certain extent, a parallel- 
ism between the " Night Thoughts" and the "Task." In 
both poems the author achieves his greatest in virtue of the new 
freedom conferred by blank verse ; both poems are profession- 
ally didactic, and mingle much satire with their graver medita- 
tions ; both poems are the productions of men whose estimate 
of this life was formed by the light of a belief in immortality, 
and who were intensely attached to Christianity. On some 
grounds we might have anticipated a more morbid view of 
things from Cowper than from Young. Cowper' s religion was 
dogmatically the more gloomy, for he was a Calvinist ; while 
Young was a " low" Arminian, believing that Christ died for 
all, and that the only obstacle to any man's salvation lay in his 
will, which ho could change if he chose. There was real and 
deep sadness involved in Cowper's personal lot ; while Young, 
apart from his ambitious and greedy discontent, seems to have 
had no great sorrow. 

Yet, see how a lovely, sympathetic nature manifests itself in 
spite of creed and circumstance ! Where is the poem that 
surpasses the " Task" in the genuine love it breathes, at once 
toward inanimate and animate existence — in truthfulness of 
perception and sincerity of presentation — in the calm gladness 
that springs from a delight in objects for their own sake, with- 
out self- reference — in divine sympathy with the lowliest pleas- 
ures, with the most short-lived capacity for pain ? Here is no 
railing at the earth's "melancholy map," but the happiest 
lingering Over her simplest scenes with all the fond minuteness 
of attention that belongs to love ; no pompous rhetoric about 
the inferiority of the " brutes," but a warm plea on their 
behalf against man's inconsiderateness and cruelty, and a sense 
of enlarged happiness from their companionship in enjoyment ; 
no vague rant about human misery and human virtue, but that 
close and vivid presentation of particular sorrows and priva- 
tions, of particular deeds and misdeeds, which is the direct 
road to the emotions. How Cowper's exquisite mind falls 



254 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT. 



with the mild warmth of morning sunlight on the commonest 
objects, at once disclosing every detail, and investing every 
detail with beauty ! No object is too small to prompt his 
song — not the sooty film on the bars, or the spoutless teapot 
holding a bit of mignonette that serves to cheer the dingy 
town-lodging with a " hint that Nature lives;" and yet his 
song is never trivial, for he is alive to small objects, not be- 
cause his mind is narrow, but because his glance is clear and 
his heart is large. Instead of trying to edify us by supercili- 
ous allusions to the " brutes" and the " stalls," he interests 
us in that tragedy of the hen-roost when the thief has wrenched 
the door, 

" Where Chanticleer amidst his harem sleeps 
In unsuspecting pomp ;" 

in the patient cattle, that on the winter's morning 

" Mourn in corners where the fence 
Screens them, and seem half petrified to sleep 
In unrecumbent sadness f ' 

in the little squirrel, that, surprised by him in his woodland 
walk, 

" At once, swift as a bird, 

Ascends the neighboring beech ; there whisks his brush, 

And perks his ears, and stamps, and cries aloud, 

With all the prettiness of feign'd alarm 

And anger insignificantly fierce." 

And then he passes into reflection, not with curt apothegm and 
snappish reproof, but with that melodious flow of utterance 
which belongs to thought when it is carried along in a stream 
of feeling : 

" The heart is hard in nature, and unfit 
For human fellowship, as being void 
Of sympathy, and therefore dead alike 
To love and friendship both, that is not pleased 
With sight of animals enjoying life, 
Nor feels their happiness augment his own." 

His large and tender heart embraces the most every-day forms 
of human life — the carter driving his team through the wintry 
storm ; the cottager's wife who, painfully nursing the embers on 
her hearth, while her infants " sit cowering o'er the sparks," 

" Retires, content to quake, so they be warm'd ;'* 

or the villager, with her little ones, going out to pick 

" A cheap but wholesome salad from the brook ;" 



WORLDLI^ESS ART) OTHEK-AVORLDLIKESS. 255 

and he compels our colder natures to follow his in its manifold 
sympathies, not by exhortations, not by telling us to meditate 
at midnight, to " indulge" the thought of death, or to ask 
ourselves how we shall " weather an eternal night," but by 
presenting to us the object of his compassion truthfully and 
lovingly. And when he handles greater themes, when he takes 
a wider survey, and considers the men or the deeds which have 
a direct influence on the welfare of communities and nations, 
there is the same unselfish warmth of feeling, the same scrupu- 
lous truthfulness. He is never vague in his remonstrance or 
his satire, but puts his finger on some particular vice or folly 
which excites his indignation or " dissolves his heart in pity," 
because of some specific injury it does to his fellow-man or to 
a sacred cause. And when he is asked why he interests him- 
self about the sorrows and wrongs of others, hear what is the 
reason he gives. Not, like Young, that the movements of the 
planets show a mutual dependence, and that 



or that — 



; ' Thus man his sovereign duty learns in this 
Material picture of benevolence," 

' More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts, 
And conscious virtue mitigates the pang." 



What is Cowper's answer, when he imagines some " sage, 
erudite, profound," asking him " What's the world to you ?" 

"Much. I was bom of woman, and drew milk 
As sweet as charity from human breasts. 
I think, articulate, I laugh and weep, 
And exercise all functions of a man. 
How then should I and any man that lives 
Be strangers to each other ?" 

Young is astonished that men can make war on each other — 
that any one can " seize his brother's throat," while 

" The Planets cry, ' Forbear.' " 

Cowper weeps because 

" There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart : 
It does not feel for man." 

Young applauds God as a monarch with an empire and a 
court quite superior to the English, or as an author who pro- 
duces " volumes for man's perusal." Cowper sees his father's 
love in all the gentle pleasures of the home fireside, in the 
charms even of the wintry landscape, and thinks — 



256 



" Happy who walks with hirn ! whom what he finds 
Of flavor or of scent in fruit or flower, 
Or what he views of beautiful or grand 
In nature, from the broad, majestic oak 
To the green blade that twinkles in the sun, 
Prompts with remembrance of a present God. " 

To conclude — for we must arrest ourselves in a contrast that 
would lead us beyond our bounds : Young flies for his utmost 
consolation to the day of judgment, when 

" Final Ruin fiercely drives 
Her ploughshare o'er creation ;' ' 

when earth, stars, and sun are swept aside, 

" And now, all dross removed, Heaven's own pure day, 
Full on the confines of our ether, flames : 
While (dreadful contrast !) far (how far !) beneath, 
Hell, bursting, belches forth her blazing seas, 
And storms saphureous ; her voracious jaws 
Expanding wide, and roaring for her prey," 

Dr. Young and similar " ornaments of religion and virtue" 
passing of course with grateful " applause" into the upper 
region. Cowper finds his highest inspiration in the Millennium 
— in the restoration of this our beloved home of earth to per- 
fect holiness and bliss, when the Supreme 

" Shall visit earth in mercy ; shall descend 
Propitious in his chariot paved with love ; 
And what his storms have blasted and defaced 
For man's revolt, shall with a smile repair." 

And into what delicious melody his song flows at the thought 
of that blessedness to be enjoyed by future generations on 
earth ! 

" The dwellers in the vales and on the rocks 
Shout to each other, and the mountains tops 
From distant mountains catch the flying joy ; 
Till, nation after nation taught the strain, 
Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round !" 

The sum of our comparison is this : In Young we have the 
type of that deficient human sympathy, that impiety toward 
the present aud the visible, which flies for its motives, its 
sanctities, and its religion, to the remote, the vague, and the 
unknown : in Cowper we have the type of that genuine love 
which cherishes things in proportion to their nearness, and feels 
its reverence grow in proportion to the intimacy of its knowl- 
edge. 



VIII. 
THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM.* 

There is a valuable class of books on great subjects which 
have something of the character and functions of good popular 
lecturing. They are not original, not subtle, not of close 
logical texture, not exquisite either in thought or style ; but by 
virtue of these negatives they are all the more fit to act on the 
average intelligence. They have enough of organizing purpose 
in them to make their facts illustrative, and to leave a distinct 
result in the mind even when most of the facts are forgotten ; 
and they have enough of vagueness and vacillation in their 
theory to win them ready acceptance from a mixed audience. 
The vagueness and vacillation are not devices of timidity ; they 
are the honest result of the writer's own mental character, 
which adapts him to be the instructor and the favorite of " the 
general reader." For the most part, the general reader of 
the present day does not exactly know what distance he goes ; 
he only knows that he does not go " too far." Of any re- 
markable thinker, whose writings have excited controversy, he 
likes to have it said that " his errors are to be deplored," leav- 
ing it not too certain what those errors are ; he is fond of what 
may be called disembodied opinions, that float in vapory 
phrases above all systems of thought or action ; he likes an 
undefined Christianity which opposes itself to nothing in par- 
ticular, an undefined education of the people, an undefined 
amelioration of all things : in fact, he likes sound views — 
nothing extreme, but something between the excesses of the 
past and the excesses of the present. This modern type of the 
general reader may be known in conversation by the cordiality 
with which he assents to indistinct, blurred statements : say 
that black is black, he will shake his head and hardly think it ; 
say that black is not so very black, he will reply, " Exactly." 

* " History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism 
in Europe." By W. E. H. Lecky, M.A. Longman & Co., London. 



258 THE ESSAYS OF 

He has no hesitation, if you wish it, even to get up at a public 
meeting and express his conviction that at times, and within 
certain limits, the radii of a circle have a tendency to be equal ; 
but, on the other hand, he would urge that the spirit of 
geometry may be carried a little too far. His only bigotry is a 
bigotry against any clearly denned opinion ; not in the least 
based on a scientific scepticism, but belonging to a lack of 
coherent thought — a spongy texture of mind, that gravitates 
strongly to nothing. The one thing he is staunch for is, the 
utmost liberty of private haziness. 

But precisely these characteristics of the general reader, 
rendering him incapable of assimilating ideas unless they are 
administered in a highly diluted form, make it a matter of 
rejoicing that there are clever, fair-minded men, who will 
write books for him — men very much above him in knowledge 
and ability, but not too remote from him in their habits of 
thinking, and who can thus prepare for him infusions of history 
and science that will leave some solidifying deposit, and save 
him from a fatal softening of the intellectual skeleton. Among 
such serviceable writers, Mr. Lecky's " History of the Rise and 
Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe" entitles him 
to a high place. He has prepared himself for its production 
by an unusual amount of well-directed reading ; he has chosen 
his facts and quotations with much judgment ; and he gives 
proof of those important moral qualifications, impartiality, 
seriousness, and modesty. This praise is chiefly applicable to 
the long chapter on the history of Magic and Witchcraft, which 
opens the work, and to the two chapters on the antecedents 
and history of Persecution, which occur, the one at the end of 
the first volume, the other at the beginning of the second. In 
these chapters Mr. Lecky has a narrower and better-traced path 
before him than in other portions of his work ; he is more 
occupied with presenting a particular class of facts in their 
historical sequence, and in their relation to certain grand tide- 
marks of opinion, than with disquisition ; and his writing is 
freer than elsewhere from an apparent confusedness of thought 
and an exuberance of approximative phrases, which can be 
serviceable in no other way than as diluents needful for the sort 
of reader we have just described. 

The history of magic and witchcraft has been judiciously 
chosen by Mr. Lecky as the subject of his first section on the 
Declining Sense of the Miraculous, because it is strikingly 
illustrative of a position with the truth of which he is strongly 



THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 259 

impressed, though he does not always treat of it with desirable 
clearness and precision, namely, that certain beliefs become 
obsolete, not in consequence of direct arguments against them, 
but because of their incongruity with prevalent habits of 
thought. Here is his statement of the two " classes of influ- 
ences" by which the mass of men, in what is called civilized 
society, get their beliefs gradually modified : 

" If we ask why it is that the world has rejected what was once so 
universally and so intensely believed, why a narrative of an old 
woman who had been seen riding on a broomstick, or who was proved 
to have transformed herself into a wolf, and to have devoured the 
flocks of her neighbors, is deemed so entirely incredible, most per- 
sons would probably be unable to give a \evy definite answer to the 
question. It is not because we have examined the evidence and 
found it insufficient, for the disbelief always precedes, when it does 
not prevent, examination. It is rather because the idea of absurdity 
is so strongly attached to such narratives, that it is difficult even to 
consider them with gravity. Yet at one time no such improbability 
was felt, and hundreds of persons have been burnt simply on the 
two grounds I have mentioned. 

" When so complete a change takes place in public opinion, it may 
be ascribed to one or other of two causes. It may be the result of a 
controvers} 7 which has conclusively settled the question, establishing 
to the satisfaction of all parties a clear preponderance of argument or 
fact in favor of one opinion, and making that opinion a truism which 
is accepted by all enlightened men, even though they have not them- 
selves examined the evidence on which it rests. Thus, if any one in 
a company of ordinarily educated persons were to deny the motion of 
the earth, or the circulation of the blood, his statement would be 
received with derision, though it is probable that some of his audi- 
ence would be unable to demonstrate the first truth, and that very 
few of them could give sufficient reasons for the second. They may 
not themselves be able to defend their position ; but they are aware 
that, at certain known periods of history, controversies on those sub- 
jects took place, and that known writers then brought forward some 
definite arguments or experiments, which were ultimately accepted 
by the whole learned world as rigid and conclusive demonstrations. 
It is possible, also, for as complete a change to be effected by what is 
called the spirit of the age. The general intellectual tendencies per- 
vading the literature of a century profoundly modify the character of 
the public mind. They form a new tone and habit of thought. They 
alter the measure of probability. They create new attractions and 
new antipathies, and they eventually cause as absolute a rejection of 
certain old opinions as could be produced by the most cogent and 
definite arguments." 

Mr. Lecky proceeds to some questionable views concerning 
the evidences of witchcraft, which seem to be irreconcilable 
even with his own remarks later on ; but they lead him to the 



260 THE ESSAYS OF 

statement, thoroughly made out by his historical survey, that 
" the movement was mainly silent, unargumentative, and in- 
sensible ; that men came gradually to disbelieve in witchcraft, 
because they came gradually to look upon it as absurd ; and 
that this new tone of thought appeared, first of all, in those 
who were least subject to theological influences, and soon 
spread through the educated laity, and, last of all, took pos- 
session of the clergy." 

We have rather painful proof that this " second class of 
influences," with avast number go hardly deeper than Fashion, 
and that witchcraft to many of us is absurd only on the same 
ground that our grandfathers' gigs are absurd. It is felt pre- 
posterous to think of spiritual agencies in connection with 
ragged beldames soaring on broomsticks, in an age when it is 
known that mediums of communication with the invisible world 
are usually unctuous personages dressed in excellent broadcloth, 
who soar above the curtain-poles without any broomstick, 
and who are not given to unprofitable intrigues. The en- 
lightened imagination rejects the figure of a witch with her 
profile in dark relief against the moon and her broomstick 
cutting a constellation. No undiscovered natural laws, no 
names of " respectable" witnesses, are invoked to make us feel 
our presumption in questioning the diabolic intimacies of that 
obsolete old woman, for it is known now that the undiscovered 
laws, and the witnesses qualified by the payment of income 
tax, are all in favor of a different conception — the image of a 
heavy gentleman in boots and black coat-tails foreshortened 
against the cornice. Yet no less a person than Sir Thomas 
Browne once wrote that those who denied there were witches, 
inasmuch as they thereby denied spirits also, were " obliquely 
and upon consequence a sort, not of infidels, but of atheists." 
At present, doubtless, in certain circles, unbelievers in heavy 
gentlemen who float in the air by means of undiscovered laws 
are also taxed with atheism ; illiberal as it is not to admit that 
mere weakness of understanding may prevent one from seeing 
how that phenomenon is necessarily involved in the Divine 
origin of things. "With still more remarkable parallelism, Sir 
Thomas Browne goes on : " Those that, to refute their in- 
credulity, desire to see apparitions, shall questionless never 
behold any, nor have the power to be so much as witches. 
The devil hath made them already in a heresy as capital as 
witchcraft, and to appear to them were but to convert them.'''' It 
would be difficult to see what has been changed here but the 



THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 261 

mere draperv of circumstance, if it were not for this prominent 
difference between our own days and the days of witchcraft, 
that instead of torturing, drowning, or burning the innocent 
we give hospitality and large pay to-the highly distinguished 
medium. At least we are safely rid of certain horrors ; but it 
the multitude— that "farraginous concurrence of all condi- 
tions, tempers, sexes, and ages"— do not roll back even to a 
superstition that carries cruelty in its tram, it is not because 
they possess a cultivated reason, but because they are pressed 
upon and held up by what we may call an external reason— the 
sum of conditions resulting from the laws of material growth, 
from changes produced by great historical collisions shattering 
the structures of ages and making new highways for events and 
ideas, and from the activities of higher minds no longer exist- 
ing merely as opinions and teaching, but as institutions and 
organizations with which the interests, the affections, and the 
habits of the multitude are inextricably interwoven. No un- 
discovered laws accounting for small phenomena going forward 
under drawing-room tables are likely to affect the tremendous 
facts of the increase of population, the rejection of convicts by 
our colonies, the exhaustion of the soil by cotton plantations, 
which urge even upon the foolish certain questions, certain 
claims, certain views concerning the scheme of the world, that 
can never again be silenced. If right reason is a right repre- 
sentation of the co-existence and sequences of things, here are 
co-existences and sequences that do not wait to be discovered, 
but press themselves upon us like bars of iron. No seances at 
a guinea a head for the sake of being pinched by ; Mary 
Jane" can annihilate railways, steamships, and electric tele- 
graphs, which are demonstrating the interdependence or. all 
human interests, and making self-interest a duct for sympathy. 
These things are part of the external Reason to which internal 
silliness has inevitably to accommodate itself. 

Three points in the history of magic and witchcraft are well 
brought out by Mr. Lecky. First, that the cruelties connected 
witlTit did not begin until men's minds had ceased to repose 
implicitly in a sacramental system which made them feel well 
armed against evil spirits ; that is, until the eleventh century, 
when there came a sort of morning dream of doubt and Heresy, 
bringino- on the one side the terror of timid consciences, and 
on the other the terrorism of authority or zeal bent on checking 
the rising struggle. In that time of comparative mental repose, 
says Mr. Lecky, 



262 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

" All those conceptions of diabolical presence ; all that predispo- 
sition toward the miraculous, which acted so fearfully upon the im- 
aginations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, existed ; but the 
implicit faith, the boundless and triumphant credulity with which the 
virtue of ecclesiastical rites was accepted, rendered them compara- 
tively innocuous. If men had been a little less superstitious, the 
effects of their superstition would have been much more terrible. It 
was firmly believed that any one who deviated from the strict line of 
orthodoxy must soon succumb beneath the power of Satan ; but as 
there was no spirit of rebellion or doubt, this persuasion did not pro- 
duce any extraordinary terrorism." 

The Church was disposed to confound heretical opinion with 
sorcery ; false doctrine was especially the devil's work, and it 
was a ready conclusion that a denier or innovator had held 
consultation with the father of lies. It is a saying of a zealous 
Catholic in the sixteenth century, quoted by Maury in his excel- 
lent work, " De la Magie" — " Crescit cum magia hcercsis, cum 
hceresi magia.'''' Even those who doubted were terrified at 
their doubts, for trust is more easily undermined than terror. 
Fear is earlier born than hope, lays a stronger grasp on man's 
system than any other passion, and remains master of a 
larger group of involuntary actions. A chief aspect of man's 
moral development is the slow subduing of fear by the gradual 
growth of intelligence, and its suppression as a motive by the 
presence of impulses less animally selfish ; so that in relation to 
invisible Power, fear at last ceases to exist, save in that inter- 
fusion with higher faculties which we call awe. 

Secondly, Mr. Lecky shows clearly that dogmatic Prot- 
estantism, holding the vivid belief in Satanic agency to be an 
essential of piety, would have felt it shame to be a whit behind 
Catholicism in severity against the devil's servants. Luther's 
sentiment was that he would not suffer a witch to live (he was 
not much more merciful to Jews) ; and, in spite of his fond- 
ness for children, believing a certain child to have been be- 1 
gotten by the devil, he recommended the parents to throw it 
into the river. The torch must be turned on the worst errors 
of heroic minds — not in irreverent ingratitude, but for the sake 
of measuring our vast and various debt to all the influences 
which have concurred, in the intervening ages, to make us 
recognize as detestable errors the honest convictions of men 
who, in mere individual capacity and moral force, were very 
much above us. Again, the Scotch Puritans, during the 
comparatively short period of their ascendency, surpassed all 
Christians before them in the elaborate ingenuity of the 



THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 263 

tortures they applied for the discovery of witchcraft and 
sorcery, and did their utmost to prove that if Scotch Calvinism 
was the true religion, the chief " note" of the true religion 
was cruelt}'. It is hardly an endurable task to read the story 
of their doings ; thoroughly to imagine them as a past reality 
is already a sort of torture. One detail is enough, and it is a 
comparatively mild one. It was the regular profession of men 
called " prickers" to thrust long pins into the body of a sus- 
pected witch in order to detect the insensible spot which was 
the infallible sign of her guilt. On a superficial view one would 
be in danger of saying that the main difference between the 
teachers who sanctioned these things and the much-despised 
ancestors who offered human victims inside a huge wicker idol, 
was that they arrived at a more elaborate barbarity by a longer 
series of dependent propositions. We do not share Mr. 
Buckle's opinion that a Scotch minister's groans were a part of 
his deliberate plan for keeping the people in a state of terrified 
subjection ; the ministers themselves held the belief they 
taught, and might well groan over it. What a blessing has a 
little false logic been to the world ! Seeing that men are so 
slow to question their premises, they must have made each 
other much more miserable, if pity had not sometimes drawn 
tender conclusions not warranted by Major and Minor ; if there 
had not been people with an amiable imbecility of reasoning 
which enabled them at once to cling to hideous beliefs, and to 
be conscientiously inconsistent with them in their conduct. 
There is nothing like acute deductive reasoning for keeping 
a man in the dark : it might be called the technique of the 
intellect, and the concentration of the mind upon it corre- 
sponds to that predominance of technical skill in art which ends 
in degradation of the artist's function, unless new inspiration 
and invention come to guide it. ' 

And of this there is some good illustration furnished by that 
third node in the history of witchcraft, the beginning of its 
end, which is treated in an interesting manner by Mr. Lecky. 
It is worth noticing, that the most important defences of the 
belief in witchcraft, against the growing scepticism in the latter 
part of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth, were the 
productions of men who in some departments were among the 
foremost thinkers of their time. One of them was Jean Bodin, 
the famous writer on government and jurisprudence, whose 
" Republic," Hallam thinks, had an important influence in 
England, and furnished " a store of arguments and examples 



264 THE ESSAYS OF 

that were not lost on the thoughtful minds of our country- 
men." In some of his views he was original and bold ; for 
example, he anticipated Montesquieu in attempting to appre- 
ciate the relations of government and climate. Hallam inclines 
to the opinion that he was a Jew, and attached Divine au- 
thority only to the Old Testament. But this was enough to 
furnish him with his chief data for the existence of witches and 
for their capital punishment ; and in the account of his 
" Republic," given by Hallam, there is enough evidence that 
the sagacity which often enabled him to make fine use of his 
learning was also often entangled in it, to temper our surprise 
at finding a writer on political science of whom it could be said 
that, along with Montesquieu, he was " the most philosophical 
of those who had read so deeply, the most learned of those 
who had thought so much," in the van of the forlorn hope to 
maintain the reality of witchcraft. It should be said that he 
was equally confident of the unreality of the Copernican 
hypothesis, on the gound that it was contrary to the tenets of 
the theologians and philosophers and to common-sense, and 
therefore subversive of the foundations of every science. Of 
his work on witchcraft, Mr. Lecky says : 

"The ' Deinonomanie des Sorciers' is chiefly an appeal to author- 
ity, which the author deemed on this subject so unanimous and so 
conclusive, that it was scarcely possible for any sane man to resist it. 
He appealed to the popular belief in all countries, in all ages, and in 
all religions. He cited the opinions of an immense multitude of the 
greatest writers of pagan antiquity, and of the most illustrious of the 
Fathers. He showed how the laws of all nations recognized the ex- 
istence of witchcraft ; and he collected hundreds of cases which had 
been investigated before the tribunals of his own or of other coun- 
tries. He relates with the most minute and circivmstantial detail, 
and with the most unfaltering confidence, all the proceedings at the 
witches' Sabbath, the methods which the witches employed in trans • 
porting themselves through the air, their transformations, their car- 
nal intercourse with the devil, their various means of injuring their 
enemies, the signs that lead to their detection, their confessions when 
iondemned, and their demeanor at the stake." 

Something must be allowed for a lawyer's affection toward 
a belief which had furnished so many " cases." Bodin's 
work had been immediately prompted by the treatise " De 
Prestigiis Daemonum," written by John Wier, a German phy- 
sician, a treatise which is worth notice as an example of a 
transitional form of opinion for which many analogies may be 
found in the history both of religion and science. Wier 



THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. .265 

believed in demons, and in possession by demons, but his 
practice as a physician had convinced him that the so-called 
witches were patients and victims, that the devil took ad- 
vantage of their diseased condition to delude them, and that 
there was no consent of an evil will on the part of the women. 
He argued that the word in Leviticus translated " witch" meant 
" poisoner," and besought the princes of Europe to hinder the 
further spilling of innocent blood. These heresies of Wier 
threw Bodin into such a state of amazed indignation that if he 
had been an ancient Jew instead of a modern economical one, 
he would have rent his garments. " No one had ever heard of 
pardon being accorded to sorcerers ;" and probably the reason 
why Charles IX. died young was because he had pardoned the 
sorcerer, Trios Echelles ! We must remember that this was in 
1581, when the great scientific movement of the Renaissance 
had hardly begun — when Galileo was a youth of seventeen, and 
Kepler a boy of ten. 

But directly afterward, on the other side, came Montaigne, 
whose sceptical acuteness could arrive at negatives without any 
apparatus of method. A certain keen narrowness of nature 
will secure a man from many absurd beliefs which the larger 
soul, vibrating to more manifold influences, would have a long 
struggle to part with. And so we find the charming, chatty 
Montaigne — in one of the brightest of his essays, " Des 
Boiteux," where he declares that, from his own observation of 
witches and sorcerers, he should have recommended them to 
be treated with curative hellebore — stating in his own way a 
pregnant doctrine, since taught more gravely. It seems to him 
much less of a prodigy that men should lie, or that their, 
imaginations should deceive them, than that a human body 
should be carried through the air on a broomstick, or up a 
chimney by some unknown spirit. He thinks it a sad business 
to persuade oneself that the test of truth lies in the multitude 
of believers — " en une prcsse oh les fols surpassent de tant les 
sages en nombre." Ordinarily, he has observed, when men 
have something stated to them as a fact, they are more ready to 
explain it than to inquire whether it is real : " ils passent par- 
dessus les propositions, mais ils examinent les consequences ; 
ils laissent les choses, et courent aux causes." There is a sort 
of strong and generous ignorance which is as honorable and 
courageous as science — " ignorance pour laquelle concevoir il 
n'y a pas moins de science qu'a concevoir la science. " And 
a jiropos of the immense traditional evidence which weighed 



2G6 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

with such men as Bodin, ho says — " As for the proofs and 
arguments founded on experience and facts, I do not pretend 
to unravel these. What end of a thread is there to lay hold 
of ? I often cut them as Alexander did his knot. Apres tout, 
c'est mettre ses conjectures a bien haut prix, que d'en /aire cuire 
un homme tout dif.' n 

Writing like this, when it finds eager readers, is a sign that 
the weather is changing ; yet much later, namely, after 1665, 
when the Royal Society had been founded, our own Glanvil, 
the author of the " Scepsis Scientifica," a work that was a 
remarkable advance toward the true definition of the limits of 
inquiry, and that won him his election as fellow of the society, 
published an energetic vindication of the belief in witchcraft, of 
which Mr. Lecky gives the following sketch : 

" The ' Sadducismus Triumphatus, ' which is probably the ablest 
book ever published in defence of the superstition, opens with a strik- 
ing picture of the rapid progress of the scepticism in England. 
Everywhere, a disbelief in witchcraft was becoming fashionable in 
the upper classes ; but it was a disbelief that arose entirely from a 
strong sense of its antecedent improbability. All who were opposed 
to the orthodox faith united in discrediting witchcraft. They laughed 
at it, as palpably absurd, as involving the most grotesque and ludi- 
crous conceptions, as so essentially incredible that it would be a waste 
of time to examine it. This spirit had arisen since the Restoration, 
although the laws were still in force, and although little or no direct 
reasoning had been brought to bear upon the subject. In order to 
combat it, Glanvil proceeded to examine the general question of the 
credibility of the miraculous. He saw that the reason why witch- 
craft was ridiculed was, because it was a phase of the miraculous and 
the work of the devil ; that the scepticism was chiefly due to those 
who disbelieved in miracles and the devil ; and that the instances of 
witchcraft or possession in the Bible were invariably placed on a level 
with those that were tried in the law courts of England. That the 
evidence o£ the belief was overwhelming, he firmly believed ; and 
this, indeed, was scarcely disputed ; but, until the sense of d priori 
improbability was removed, no possible accumulation of facts would 
cause men to believe it. To that task he accordingly addressed him- 
self. Anticipating the idea and almost the words of modern contro- 
versialists, he urged that there was such a thing as a credulity of un- 
belief ; and that those who believed so strange a concurrence of de- 
lusions, as was necessary on the supposition of the unreality of witch- 
craft, were far more credulous than those who accepted the belief. 
He made his very scepticism his principal weapon ; and, analyzing 
with much acuteness the a priori objections, he showed that they 
rested upon an unwarrantable confidence in our knowledge of the 
laws of the spirit world ; that they implied the existence of some strict 
analogy between the faculties of men and of spirits ; and that, as 
such analogy most probably did not exist, no reasoning based on the 



THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 267 

supposition could dispense men from examining the evidence. He 
concluded with a large collection of cases, the evidence of which was, 
as he thought, incontestible." 

We have quoted this sketch because GlanviPs argument 
against the a priori objection of absurdity is fatiguingly urged 
in relation to other alleged marvels which, to busy people 
seriously occupied with the difficulties of affairs, of science, or 
of art, seem as little worthy of examination as aeronautic 
broomsticks. And also because we here see Glanvil, in com- 
bating an incredulity that does not happen to be his own, 
wielding that very argument of traditional evidence which he 
had made the subject of vigorous attack in his " Scepsis Scien- 
tifica." But perhaps large minds have been peculiarly liable 
to this fluctuation concerning the sphere of tradition, because, 
while they have attacked its misapplications, they have been 
the more solicited by the vague sense that tradition is really the 
basis of our best life. Our sentiments may be called organized 
traditions ; and a large part of our actions gather all their 
justification, all their attraction and aroma, from the memory 
of the life lived, of the actions done, before we were born. In 
the absence of any profound research into psychological func- 
tions or into the mysteries of inheritance, in the absence of any 
comprehensive view of man's historical development and the 
dependence of one age on another, a mind at all rich in sensi- 
bilities must always have had an indefinite uneasiness in an 
undistinguishing attack on the coercive influence of tradition. 
And this may be the apology for the apparent inconsistency of 
GlanviPs acute criticism on the one side, and his indignation at 
the ' ' looser gentry, ' ' who laughed at the evidences for witch- 
craft on the other. We have already taken up too much space 
with this subject of witchcraft, else we should be tempted to 
dwell on Sir Thomas Browne, who far surpassed Glanvil in 
magnificent incongruity of opinion, and whose works are the 
most remarkable combination existing, of witty sarcasm against 
ancient nonsense and modern obsequiousness, with indications 
of a capacious credulity. After all, we may be sharing what 
seems to us the hardness of these men, who sat in their studies 
and argued at their ease about a belief that would be reckoned 
to have caused more misery and bloodshed than any other 
superstition, if there had been no such thing as persecution on 
the ground of religious opinion. 

On this subject of Persecution, Mr. Lecky writes his best : 
with clearness of conception, with calm justice, bent on appro- 



268 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

dating the necessary tendency of ideas, and with an appro- 
priateness of illustration that could be supplied only by ex- 
tensive and intelligent reading. Persecution, he shows, is not 
in any sense peculiar to the Catholic Church ; it is a direct 
sequence of the doctrines that salvation is to be had only 
within the Church, and that erroneous belief is damnatory — 
doctrines held as fully by Protestant sects as by the Catholics ; 
and in proportion to its power, Protestantism has been as per- 
secuting as Catholicism. He maintains, in opposition to the 
favorite modern notion of persecution defeating its own object, 
that the Church, holding the dogma of exclusive salvation, 
was perfectly consequent, and really achieved its end of 
spreading one belief and quenching another, by calling in the 
aid of the civil arm. Who will say that governments, by their 
power over institutions and patronage, as well as over punish- 
ment, have not power also over the interests and inclinations of 
men, and over most of those external conditions into which 
subjects are born, and which make them adopt the prevalent 
belief as a second nature ? Hence, to a sincere believer in the 
doctrine of exclusive salvation, governments had it in their 
power to save men from perdition ; and wherever the clergy 
were at the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they 
were Catholic or Protestant, persecution was the result. 
11 Compel them to come in" was a rule that seemed sanctioned 
by mercy, and the horrible sufferings it led men to inflict 
seemed small to minds accustomed to contemplate, as a per- 
petual source of motive, the eternal unmitigated miseries of a 
hell that was the inevitable destination of a majority among 
mankind. 

It is a significant fact, noted by Mr. Lecky, that the only 
two leaders of the Reformation who advocated tolerance were 
Zuinglius and Socinus, both of them disbelievers in exclusive 
salvation. And in corroboration of other evidence that the 
chief triumphs of the Reformation were due to coercion, he 
commends to the special attention of his readers the following 
quotation from a work attributed without question to the 
famous Protestant theologian, Jurieu, who had himself been 
hindered, as a Protestant, from exercising his professional 
functions in France, and was settled as pastor at Rotterdam. 
It should be remembered that Jurieu's labors fell in the latter 
part of the seventeenth century and in the beginning of the 
eighteenth, and that he was the contemporary of Bayle, with 
whom he was in bitter controversial hostility. He wrote, then, at 



THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 269 

a time when there was warm debate on the question of Tolera- 
tion ; and it was his great object to vindicate himself and his 
French fellow-Protestants from all laxity on this point. 

" Pent on nier que le panganisme est tombe dans le monde par 
1' autorite des empereurs Rornains ? On peut assurer sans temerite 
que le paganisme seroit encore debout, et que les trois quarts de 
1' Europe seroient encore pay ens si Constantin et ses successeurs 
n'avaient employe leur autorite pour l'abolir. Mais, je vous prie, de 
quelles voies Dieu s'est il servi dans ces derniers siecles pour retablir 
la veritable religion dans l'Occident? Les rois de Suede, ceux de Dan- 
emarck, ceux d' Angleterre, les magistrats souverains de Suisse, des Pais 
Bas, des villes livres d' Allemagne, les princes electeurs, et aidres princes 
souverains de V empire, n'ont ils pas emploie leur autorite pour abbaitre le 
Papisme?" 

Indeed, wherever the tremendous alternative of everlasting 
torments is believed in — believed in so that it becomes a motive 
determining the life — not only persecution, but every other 
form of severity and gloom are the legitimate consequences. 
There is much ready declamation in these days against the 
spirit of asceticism and against zeal for doctrinal conversion ; 
but surely the macerated form of a Saint Francis, the fierce 
denunciations of a Saint Dominic, the groans and prayerful 
wrestlings of the Puritan who seasoned his bread with tears 
and made all pleasurable sensation sin, are more in keeping 
with the contemplation of unending anguish as the destiny of 
a vast multitude whose nature we share, than the rubicund 
cheerfulness of some modern divines, who profess to unite a 
smiling liberalism with a well-bred and tacit but unshaken confi- 
dence in the reality of the bottomless pit. But, in fact, as Mr. 
Lecky maintains, that awful image, with its group of associated 
dogmas concerning the inherited curse, and the damnation of 
unbaptized infants, of heathens, and of heretics, has passed 
away from what he is fond of calling " the realizations" of 
Christendom. These things are no longer the objects of 
practical belief. They may be mourned for in encyclical 
letters ; bishops may regret them ; doctors of divinity may 
sign testimonials to the excellent character of these decayed 
beliefs ; but for the mass of Christians they are no more 
influential than unrepealed but forgotten statutes. And with 
these dogmas has melted away the strong basis for the defence 
of persecution. No man now writes eager vindications of 
himself and his colleagues from the suspicion of adhering to 
the principle of toleration. And this momentous change, it 
is Mr. Lecky's object to show, is due to that concurrence of 



270 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT.'' 

conditions which he has chosen to call " the advance of the 
Spirit of Rationalism." 

In other parts of his work, where he attempts to trace the 
action of the same conditions on the acceptance of miracles and 
on other chief phases of our historical development, Mr. Lecky 
has laid himself open to considerable criticism. The chapters 
on the " Miracles of the Church," the aesthetic, scientific, and 
moral development of Rationalism, the Secularization of Politics, 
and the Industrial History of Rationalism, embrace a wide range 
of diligently gathered facts ; but they are nowhere illuminated 
by a sufficiently clear conception and statement of the agencies 
at work, or the mode of their action, in the gradual modifica- 
tion of opinion and of life. The writer frequently impresses 
us as being in a state of hesitation concerning his own standing- 
point, which may form a desirable stage in private meditation 
but not in published exposition. Certain epochs in theoretic 
conception, certain considerations, which should be funda- 
mental to his survey, are introduced quite incidentally in a 
sentence or two f or in a note which seems to be an after- 
thought. Great writers and their ideas are touched upon too 
slightly and with too little discrimination, and important the- 
ories are sometimes characterized with a rashness which con- 
scientious revision will correct. There is a fatiguing use of 
vague or shifting phrases, such as " modern civilization," 
" spirit of the age," " tone of thought," intellectual type of 
the age," bias of the imagination," "habits of religious 
thought," unbalanced by any precise definition ; and the spirit 
of rationalism is sometimes treated of as if it lay outside the 
specific mental activities of which it is a generalized expression. 
Mr. Curdle's famous definition of the dramatic unities as " a 
sort of a general oneness," is not totally false ; but such 
luminousness as it has could only be perceived by those who 
already knew what the unities were. Mr. Lecky has the 
advantage of being strongly impressed with the great part 
played by the emotions in the formation of opinion, and with 
the high complexity of the causes at work in social evolution ; 
but he frequently writes as if he had never yet distinguished 
between the complexity of the conditions that produce prev- 
alent states of mind and the inability of particular minds to 
give distinct reasons for the preferences or persuasions pro- 
duced by those states. In brief, he does not discriminate, or 
does not help his reader to discriminate, between objective 
complexity and subjective confusion. But the most muddle- 



THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 271 

headed gentleman who represents the spirit of the age by ob- 
serving, as he settles his collar, that the development theory is 
quite " the thing" is a result of definite processes, if we could 
only trace them. " Mental attitudes," and " predispositions," 
however vague in consciousness, have not vague causes, any 
more than the " blind motions of the spring" in plants and 
animals. 

The word "Rationalism" has the misfortune, shared by 
most words in this gray world, of being somewhat equivocal. 
This evil may be nearly overcome by careful preliminary defi- 
nition ; but Mr. Lecky does not supply this, and the original 
specific application of the word to a particular phase of biblical 
interpretation seems to have clung about his use of it with a 
misleading effect. Through some parts of his book he appears 
to regard the grand characteristic of modern thought and 
civilization, compared with ancient, as a radiation in the first 
instance from a change in religious conceptions. The su- 
premely important fact, that the gradual reduction of all 
phenomena within the sphere of established law, which carries 
as a consequence the rejection of the miraculous, has its de- 
termining current in the development of physical science, seems 
to have engaged comparatively little of his attention ; at least, 
he gives it no prominence. The great conception of universal 
regular sequence, without partiality, and without caprice — the 
conception which is the most potent force at work in the 
modification of our faith, and of the practical form given to 
our sentiments — could only grow out of that patient watching 
of external fact, and that silencing of preconceived notions, 
which are urged upon the mind by the problems of physical 
science. 

There is not room here to explain and justify the impressions 
of dissatisfaction which have been briefly indicated, but a 
serious writer like Mr. Lecky will not find such suggestions 
altogether useless. The objections, even the misunderstand- 
ings, of a reader who is not careless or ill-disposed, may serve 
to stimulate an author's vigilance over his thoughts as well as 
his style. It would be gratifying to see some future proof that 
Mr. Lecky has acquired juster views than are implied in the 
assertion that philosophers of the sensational school " can never 
rise to the conception of the disinterested ;" and that he has 
freed himself from all temptation to that mingled laxity of 
statement and ill-pitched elevation of tone which are painfully 
present in the closing pages of his second volume. 



IX. 

THE GRAMMAR OF ORNAMENT.* 

The inventor of movable types, says the venerable Teufels- 
drockh, was disbanding hired armies, cashiering most kings and 
senates, and creating a whole new democratic world. Has any 
one yet said what great things are being done by the men who 
are trying to banish ugliness from our streets and our homes, 
and to make both the outside and inside of our dwellings 
worthy of a world where there are forests and flower-tressed 
meadows, and the plumage of birds ; where the insects carry 
lessons of color on their wings, and even the surface of a stag- 
nant pool will show us the wonders of iridescence and the most 
delicate forms of leafage ? They, too, are modifying opinions, 
for they are modifying men's moods and habits, which are the 
mothers of opinions, having quite as much to do with their 
formation as the responsible father — Reason. Think of certain 
hideous manufacturing towns where the piety is chiefly a belief 
in copious perdition, and the pleasure is chiefly gin. The dingy 
surface of wall pierced by the ugliest windows, the staring shop- 
fronts, paper-hangings, carpets, brass and gilt mouldings, and 
advertising placards, have an effect akin to that of malaria ; it 
is easy to understand that with such surroundings there is more 
belief in cruelty than in beneficence, and that the best earthly 
bliss attainable is the dulling of the external senses. For it is 
a fatal mistake to suppose that ugliness which is taken for 
beauty will answer all the purposes of beauty ; the subtle 
relation between all kinds of truth and fitness in our life for- 
bids that bad taste should ever be harmless to our moral 
sensibility or our intellectual discernment ; and — more than 
that — as it is probable that fine musical harmonies have a sana- 
tive influence over our bodily organization, it is also probable 

* " The Grammar of Ornament." By Owen Jones, Architect. Il- 
lustrated by Examples from various Styles of Ornament. One hun- 
dred and twelve plates. Day &■ Son, London. 



THE GRAMMAR OF ORNAMENT. 273 

that just coloring and lovely combinations of lines may be 
necessary to the complete well-being of our systems apart from 
any conscious delight in them. A savage may indulge in dis- 
cordant chuckles and shrieks and gutturals, and think that they 
please the gods, but it does not follow that his frame would 
not be favorably wrought upon by the vibrations of a grand 
church organ. One sees a person capable of choosing the worst 
style of wall-paper become suddenly afflicted by its ugliness 
under an attack of illness. And if an evil state of blood and 
lymph usually goes along with an evil state of mind, who shall 
say that the ugliness of our streets, the falsity of our ornamenta- 
tion, the vulgarity of our upholstery, have not something to do 
with those bad tempers which breed false conclusions ? 

On several grounds it is possible to make a more speedy and 
extensive application of artistic reform to our interior decora- 
tion than to our external architecture. One of these grounds 
is that most of our ugly buildings must stand ; we cannot af- 
ford to pull them down. But every year we are decorating 
interiors afresh, and people of modest means may benefit by 
the introduction of beautiful designs into stucco ornaments, 
paper-hangings, draperies, and carpets. Fine taste in the dec- 
oration of interiors is a benefit that spreads from the palace to 
the clerk's house with one parlor. 

All honor, then, to the architect who has zealously vindicated 
the claim of internal ornamentation to be a part of the archi- 
tect's function, and has labored to rescue that form of art which 
is most closely connected with the sanctities and pleasures of 
our hearths from the hands of uncultured tradesmen. All the 
nation ought at present to know that this effort is peculiarly 
associated with the name of Mr. Owen Jones ; and those who 
are most disposed to dispute with the architect about his color- 
ing must at least recognize the high artistic principle which has 
directed his attention to colored ornamentation as a proper 
branch of architecture. One monument of his effort in this 
way is his "Grammar of Ornament," of which a new and 
cheaper edition has just been issued. The one point in which 
it differs from the original and more expensive edition, viz., 
the reduction in the size of the pages (the amount of matter 
and number of plates are unaltered), is really an advantage ; it 
is now a very manageable folio, and when the reader is in a 
lounging mood may be held easily on the knees. It is a mag- 
nificent book ; and those who know no more of it than the 
title should be told that they will find in it a pictorial history 



274 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

of ornamental design, from its rudimentary condition as seen 
in the productions of savage tribes, through all the other great 
types of art — the Egyptian, Assyrian, ancient Persian, Greek, 
Roman, Byzantine, Arabian, Moresque, Mohammedan-Persian, 
Indian, Celtic, Mediaeval, Renaissance, Elizabethan, and Italian. 
The letter-press consists, first, of an introductory statement of 
fundamental principles of ornamentation — principles, says the 
author, which will be found to have been obeyed more or less 
instinctively by all nations in proportion as their art has been 
a genuine product of the national genius ; and, secondly, of 
brief historical essays, some of them contributed by other 
eminent artists, presenting a commentary on each characteristic 
series of illustrations, with the useful appendage of biblio- 
graphical lists. 

The title " Grammar of Ornament" is so far appropriate that 
it indicates what Mr. Owen Jones is most anxious to be under- 
stood concerning the object of his work, namely, that it is 
intended to illustrate historically the application of principles, 
and not to present a collection of models for mere copyists. The 
plates correspond to examples in syntax, not to be repeated par- 
rot-like, but to be studied as embodiments of syntactical princi- 
ples. There is a logic of form which cannot be departed from 
in ornamental design without a corresponding remoteness from 
perfection ; unmeaning, irrelevant lines are as bad as irrelevant 
words or clauses, that tend no whither. And as a suggestion 
toward the origination of fresh ornamental design, the work 
concludes with some beautiful drawings of leaves and flowers 
from nature, that the student, tracing in them the simple laws 
of form which underlie an immense variety in beauty, may the 
better discern the method by which the same laws were applied 
in the finest decorative work of the past, and may have all the 
clearer prospect of the unexhausted possibilities of freshness 
which lie before him, if, refraining from mere imitation, he 
will seek only such likeness to existing forms of ornamental art 
as arises from following like principles of combination. 



ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. 

Fellow- Workmen : I am not going to take up your time by- 
complimenting you. It lias been the fashion to compliment 
kings and other authorities when they have come into power, 
and to tell them that, under their wise and beneficent rule, 
happiness would certainly overflow the land. But the end has 
not always corresponded to that beginning. If it were true 
that we who work for wages had more of the wisdom and 
virtue necessary to the right use of power than has been shown 
by the aristocratic and mercantile classes, we should not glory 
much in that fact, or consider that it carried with it any near 
approach to infallibility. 

In my opinion, there has been too much complimenting of 
that sort ; and whenever a speaker, whether he is one of our- 
selves or not, wastes our time in boasting or flattery, I say, let 
us hiss him. If we have the beginning of wisdom, which is, 
to know a little truth about ourselves, we know that as a body 
we are neither very wise nor very virtuous. And to prove this, 
I will not point specially to our own habits and doings, but to 
the general state of the country. Any nation that had within 
it a majority of men — and we are the majority — possessed of 
much wisdom and virtue, would not tolerate the bad practices, 
the commercial lying and swindling, the poisonous adulteration 
of goods, the retail cheating, and the political bribery which 
are carried on boldly in the midst of us. A majority has the 
power of creating a public opinion. We could groan and hiss 
before we had the franchise : if we had groaned and hissed in 
the right place, if we had discerned better between good and 
evil, if the multitude of us artisans, and factory hands, and 
miners, and laborers of all sorts, had been skilful, faithful, 
well-judging, industrious, sober — and I don't see how there can 
be wisdom and virtue anywhere without these qualities — we 
should have made an audience that would have shamed the 
other classes out of their share in the national vices. We 
should have had better members of Parliament, better religious 



276 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

teachers, honester tradesmen, fewer foolish demagogues, less 
impudence in infamous and brutal men ; and we should not 
have had among us the abomination of men calling themselves 
religious while living in splendor on ill-gotten gains. I say, it 
is not possible for any society in which there is a very large 
body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society 
is — to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so 
much belief in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a 
notion of what pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above 
his fellows. Therefore, let us have done with this nonsense 
about our being much better than the rest of our countrymen, 
or the pretence that that was a reason why we ought to have 
such an extension of the franchise as has been given to us. The 
reason for our having the franchise, as I want presently to 
show, lies somewhere else than in our personal good qualities, 
and does not in the least lie in any high betting chance that a 
delegate is a better man than a duke, or that a Sheffield grinder 
is a better man than any one of the firm he works for. 

However, we have got our franchise now. We have been 
sarcastically called in the House of Commons the future 
masters of the country ; and if that sarcasm contains any truth, 
it seems to me that the first thing we had better think of is, 
our heavy responsibility ; that is to say, the terrible risk we 
run of working mischief and missing good, as others have done 
before us. Suppose certain men, discontented with the irriga- 
tion of a country which depended for all its prosperity on the 
right direction being given to the waters of a great river, had 
got the management of the irrigation before they were quite 
sure how exactly it could be altered for the better, or whether 
they could command the necessary agency for such an altera- 
tion. Those men would have a difficult and dangerous business 
on their hands ; and the more sense, feeling, and knowledge 
they had, the more they would be likely to tremble rather than 
to triumph. Our situation is not altogether unlike theirs. For 
general prosperity and well-being is a vast crop, that like the 
corn in Egypt can be come at, not at all by hurried snatching, 
but only by a well-judged patient process ; and whether our 
political power will be any good to us now we have got it, 
must depend entirely on the means and materials — the knowl- 
edge, ability, and honesty we have at command. These three 
things are the only conditions on which we can get any lasting 
benefit, as every clever workman among us knows : he knows 
that for an article to be worth much there must be a good 
invention or plan to go upon, there must be a well-prepared 



ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. 277 

material, and there must be skilful and honest work in carrying 
out the plan. And by this test we may try those who want to 
be our leaders. Have they anything to offer us besides indig- 
nant talk ? When they tell us we ought to have this, that, or 
the other thing, can they explain to us any reasonable, fair, 
safe way of getting it ? Can they argue in favor of a particular 
change by showing us pretty closely how the change is likely 
to work ? I don't want to decry a just indignation ; on the 
contrary, I should like it to be more thorough and general. A 
wise man, more than two thousand years ago, when he was 
asked what would most tend to lessen injustice in the world, 
said, " If every bystander felt as indignant at a wrong as if he 
himself were the sufferer." Let us cherish such indignation. 
But the long-growing evils of a great nation are a tangled 
business, asking for a good deal more than indignation in order 
to be got rid of. Indignation is a fine war-horse, but the war- 
horse must be ridden by a man : it must be ridden by rational- 
ity, skill, courage, armed with the right weapons, and taking 
definite aim. 

We have reason to be discontented with many things, and, 
looking back either through the history of England to much 
earlier generations or to the legislation and administrations of 
later times, we are justified in saying that many of the evils 
under which our country now suffers are the consequences of 
folly, ignorance, neglect, or self-seeking in those who, at 
different times have wielded the powers of rank, office, and 
money. But the more bitterly we feel this, the more loudly 
we utter it, the stronger is the obligation we lay on ourselves 
to beware, lest we also, by a too hasty wresting of measures 
which seem to promise an immediate partial relief, make a 
worse time of it for our own generation, and leave a bad in- 
heritance to our children. The deepest curse of wrong-doing, 
whether of the foolish or wicked sort, is that its effects are 
difficult to be undone. I suppose there is hardly anything 
more to be shuddered at than that part of the history of disease 
which shows how, when a man injures his constitution by a life 
of vicious excess, his children and grandchildren inherit dis- 
eased bodies and minds, and how the effects of that unhappy 
inheritance continue to spread beyond our calculation. This is 
only one example of the law by which human lives are linked 
together ; another example of what we complain of when we 
point to our pauperism, to the brutal ignorance of multitudes 
among our fellow countrymen, to the weight of taxation laid 
on us by blamable wars, to the wasteful channels made for the 



278 THE ESSAYS OF " GEORGE ELIOT." 

public money, to the expense and trouble of getting justice, and 
call these the effects of bad rule. This is the law that we all bear 
the yoke of, the law of no man's making, and which no man can 
undo. Everybody now sees an example of it in the case of Ire- 
land. We who are living now are sufferers by the wrong-doing of 
those who lived before us ; we are the sufferers by each other's 
wrong- doing ; and the children who come after us are and will 
be sufferers from the same causes. Will any man say he 
doesn't care for that law — it is nothing to him — what he wants 
is to better himself ? With what face then will he complain of 
any injury ? If he says that in politics or in any sort of social 
action he will not care to know what are likely to be the con- 
sequences to others besides himself, he is defending the very 
worst doings that have brought about his discontent. He 
might as well say that there is no better rule needful for men 
than that each should tug and drive for what will please him, 
without caring how that tugging will act on the fine wide- 
spread network of society in which he is fast meshed. If any 
man taught that as a doctrine, we should know him for a fool. 
But there are men who act upon it ; every scoundrel, for 
example, whether he is a rich religious scoundrel who lies and 
cheats on a large scale, and will perhaps come and ask you to 
send him to Parliament, or a poor pocket-picking scoundrel, 
who will steal your loose pence while you are listening round 
the platform. None of us are so ignorant as not to know that 
a society, a nation is held together by just the opposite doc- 
trine and action — by the dependence of men on each other and 
the sense they have of a common interest in preventing injury. 
And we working men are, I think, of all classes the last that 
can afford to forget this ; for if we did we should be much 
like sailors cutting away the timbers of our own ship to warm 
our grog with. For what else is the meaning of our trades- 
unions ? W x hat else is the meaning of every flag we carry, 
every procession we make, every crowd we collect for the sake 
of making some protest on behalf of our body as receivers of 
wages, if not this : that it is our interest to stand by each other, 
and that this being the common interest, no one of us will try 
to make a good bargain for himself without considering what 
will be good for his fellows ? And every member of a union 
believes that the wider he can spread his union, the stronger 
and surer will be the effect of it. So I think I shall be borne 
out in saying that a working man w ho can put two and two 
together, or take three from four and see what will be the re- 
mainder, can understand that a society, to be well off, must bo 



ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. 279 

made up chiefly of men who consider the general good as well 
as their own. 

Well, but taking the world as it is — and this is one way we 
must take it when we want to find out how it can be improved 
— no society is made up of a single class : society stands 
before us like that wonderful piece of life, the human body, 
with all its various parts depending on one another, and with a 
terrible liability to. get wrong because of that delicate depend- 
ence. We all know how many diseases the human body is 
apt to suffer from, and how difficult it is even for the doctors 
to find out exactly where the seat or beginning of the disorder 
is. That is "because the body is made up of so many various 
parts, all related to each other, or likely all to feel the effect if 
any one of them goes wrong. It is somewhat the same with 
our old nations or societies. No society ever stood long in the 
world without getting to be composed of different classes. 
Now, it is all pretence to say that there is no such thing as 
class interest. It is clear that if any particular number of men 
get a particular benefit from any existing institution, they are 
likely to band together, in order to keep up that benefit and 
increase it, until it is perceived to be unfair and injurious to 
another large number, who get knowledge and strength enough 
to set up a resistance. And this, again, has been part of the 
history of every great society since history began. But the 
simple reason for this being, that any large body of men is 
likely to have more of stupidity, narrowness, and greed than of 
farsightedness and generosity, it is plain that the number who 
resist unfairness and injury are in danger of becoming injurious 
in their turn. And in this way a justifiable resistance has 
become a damaging convulsion, making everything worse 
instead of better. This has been seen so often that we ought 
to profit a little by the experience. So long as there is selfish- 
ness in men ; so long as they have not found out for them- 
selves institutions which express and carry into practice the 
truth, that the highest interest of mankind must at last be a 
common and not a divided interest ; so long as the gradual 
operation of steady causes has not made that truth a part of 
every man's knowledge and feeling, just as we now not only 
know that it is good for our health to be cleanly, but feel that 
cleanliness is only another word for comfort, which is the 
under-side or lining of all pleasure ; so long, I say as men wink 
at their own knowingness, or hold their heads high because 
they have got an advantage over their fellows ; so long class 
interest will be in danger of making itself felt injuriously. 



280 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT." 

No set of men -will get any sort of power without being in 
danger of wanting more than their right share. But, on the 
other hand, it is just as certain that no set of men will get 
angry at having less than their right share, and set up a claim 
on that ground, without falling into just the same danger of 
exacting too much, and exacting it in wrong ways. It's human 
nature we have got to work with all round, and nothing else. 
That seems like saying something very commonplace — nay, 
obvious ; as if one should say that where there are hands there 
are mouths. Yet, to hear a good deal of the speechifying and 
to see a good deal of the action that go forward, one might 
suppose it was forgotten. 

But I come back to this : that, in our old society, there are 
old institutions, and among them the various distinctions and 
inherited advantages of classes, which have shaped themselves 
along with all the wonderful slow-growing system of things made 
up of our laws, our commerce, and our stores of all sorts, 
whether in material objects, such as buildings and machinery, 
or in knowledge, such as scientific thought and professional 
skill. Just as in that case I spoke of before, the irrigation of 
a country, which must absolutely have its water distributed or 
it will bear no crop ; there are the old channels, the old banks, 
and the old pumps, which must be used as they are until new 
and better have been prepared, or the structure of the old has 
been gradually altered. But it would be fool's work to batter 
down a pump only because a better might be. made, when you 
had no machinery ready for a new one : it would be wicked 
work, if villages lost their crops by it. Now the only safe way 
by which society can be steadily improved and our worst evils 
reduced, is not by any attempt to do away directly with the 
actually existing class distinctions and advantages, as if every- 
body could have the same sort of work, or lead the same sort 
of life (which none of my hearers are stupid enough to sup- 
pose), but by the turning of class interests into class functions 
or duties. What I mean is, that each class should be urged 
by the surrounding conditions to perform its particular work 
under the strong pressure of responsibility to the nation at 
large ; that our public affairs should be got into a state in 
which there should be no impunity for foolish or faithless 
conduct. In this way the public judgment would sift out 
incapability and dishonesty from posts of high charge, and 
even personal ambition would necessarily become of a worthier 
sort, since the desires of the most selfish men must be a good 
deal shaped by the opinions of those around them ; and for 



ADDKE3S TO WORKING MEX, BY FELIX HOLT. 281 

one person to put on a cap and bells, or to go about dishonest 
or paltry ways of getting rich that he may spend a vast sum of 
money in having more finery thau his neighbors, he must be 
pretty sure of a crowd who will applaud him. Now, changes 
can only be good in proportion as they help to bring about this 
sort of result : in proportion as they put knowledge in the 
place of ignorance, and fellow-feeling in the place of selfish- 
ness. In the course of that substitution class distinctions must 
inevitably change their character, and represent the varying 
duties of men, not their varying interests. But this end will 
not come by impatience. " Day will not break the sooner 
because we get up before the twilight." Still less will it come 
by mere undoing, or change merely as change. And more- 
over, if we believed that it would be unconditionally hastened 
by our getting the franchise, we should be what I call super- 
stitious men, believing in magic, or the production of a result 
by hocus-pocus. Our getting the franchise will greatly hasten 
that good end in proportion only as every one of us has the 
knowledge, the foresight, the conscience, that will make him 
well-judging and scrupulous in the use of it. The nature of 
things in this world has been determined for us beforehand, 
and in such a way that no ship can be expected to sail well on 
a difficult voyage, and reach the right port, unless it is well 
manned : the nature of the winds and the waves, of the tim- 
bers, the sails, and the cordage, will not accommodate itself to 
drunken, mutinous sailors. 

You w\\] not suspect me of wanting to preach any cant to 
you, or of joining in the pretence that everything is in a fine 
way, and need not be made better. What I am striving to 
keep in our minds is the care, the precaution, with which we 
should go about making things better, so that the public order 
may not be destroyed, so that no fatal shock may be given to 
this society of ours, this living body in which our lives are 
bound up. After the Reform Bill of 1832 I was in an elec- 
tion riot, which showed me clearly, on a small scale, what 
public disorder must always be ; and I have never forgotten 
that the riot was brought about chiefly by the agency of dis • 
honest men who professed to be on the people's side. Now, 
the danger hanging over change is great, just in proportion as 
it tends to produce such disorder by giving any large number 
of ignorant men, whose notions of what is good are of a low 
and brutal sort, the belief that they have got power into their 
hands, and may do pretty much as they like. If any one can 
look round us and say that he sees no signs of any such danger 



282 THE ESSAYS OF 

now, and that our national condition is running along like a 
clear broadening stream, safe not to get choked with mud, I 
call him a cheerful man : perhaps he does his own gardening, 
and seldom taken exercise far away from home. To us who 
have no gardens, and often walk abroad, it is plain that we can 
never get into a bit of a crowd but we must rub clothes with a 
set of roughs, who have the worst vices of the worst rich — who 
are gamblers, sots, libertines, knaves, or else mere sensual 
simpletons and victims. They are the ugly crop that has 
sprung up while the stewards have been sleeping ; they are 
the multiplying brood begotten by parents who have been left 
without all teaching save that of a too craving body, without 
all well-being save the fading delusions of drugged beer and 
gin. They are the hideous margin of society, at one edge 
drawing toward it the undesigning ignorant poor, at the other 
darkening imperceptibly into the lowest criminal class. Here 
is one of the evils which cannot be got rid of quickly, and 
against which any of us who have got sense, decency, and 
instruction have need to watch. That these degraded fellow- 
men could really get the mastery in a persistent disobedience to 
the laws and in a struggle to subvert order, I do not believe ; 
but wretched calamities must come from the very beginning of 
such a struggle, and the continuance of it would be a civil 
war, in which the inspiration on both sides might soon cease to 
be even a false notion of good, and might become the direct 
savage impulse of ferocity. We have all to see to it that we 
do not help to rouse what I may call the savage beast in the 
breasts of our generation — that we do not help to poison the 
nation's blood, and make richer provision for bestiality to 
come. We know well enough that oppressors have sinned in 
this way — that oppression has notoriously made men mad ; 
and we are determined to resist oppression. But let us, if 
possible, show that we can keep sane in our resistance, and 
shape our means more and more reasonably toward the least 
harmful, and therefore the speediest, attainment of our end. 
Let us, I say, show that our spirits are too strong to be driven 
mad, but can keep that sober determination which alone gives 
mastery over the adaptation of means. And a first guarantee of 
this sanity will be to act as if we understood that the funda- 
mental duty of a government is to preserve order, to enforce 
obedience of the laws. It has been held hitherto that a man can 
be depended on as a guardian of order only when he has much 
money and comfort to lose. But a better state of things would 
be, that men who had little money and not much comfort 



ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN", BY FELIX HOLT. 283 

should still be guardians of order, because they had sense 
to see that disorder would do no good, and had a heart of 
justice, pity, and fortitude, to keep them from making more 
misery only because they felt some misery themselves. There 
are thousands of artisans who have already shown this fine 
spirit, and have endured much with patient heroism. If such 
a spirit spread, and penetrated us all, we should soon become 
the masters of the country in the best sense and to the best 
ends. For, the public order being preserved, there can be no 
government in future that will not be determined by our in- 
sistance on our fair and practicable demands. It is only by 
disorder that our demands will be choked, that we shall rind 
ourselves lost among a brutal rabble, with all the intelligence of 
the country opposed to us, and see government in the shape of 
guns that will sweep us down in the ignoble martyrdom of fools. 

It has been a too common notion that to insist much on the 
preservation of order is the part of a selfish aristocracy and a 
selfish commercial class, because among these, in the nature of 
things, have been found the opponents of change. I am a 
Radical ; and, what is more, I am not a Radical with a title, 
or a French cook, or even an entrance into fine society. I 
expect great changes, and I desire them. But I don't expect 
them to come in a hurry, by mere inconsiderate sweeping. 
A Hercules with a big besom is a fine thing for a filthy stable, 
but not for weeding a seed-bed, where his besom would soon 
make a barren floor. 

That is old-fashioned talk, some one may say. "We know all 
that. 

Yes, when things are put in an extreme way, most people 
think they know them ; but, after all, they are comparatively 
few who see the small degrees by which those extremes are 
arrived at, or have the resolution and self-control to resist the 
little impulses by which they creep on surely toward a fatal 
end. Does anybody set out meaning to ruin himself, or to 
drink himself to death, or to waste his life so that he becomes 
a despicable old man, a superannuated nuisance, like a fly in 
winter. Yet there are plenty, of whose lot this is the pitiable 
story. Well now, supposing us all to have the best intentions, 
we working men, as a body, run some risk of bringing evil on 
the nation in that unconscious manner — half hurrying, half 
pushed in a jostling march toward an end we are not thinking 
of. For just as there are many things which we know better 
and feel much more strongly than the richer, softer-handed 
classes can know or feel them ; so there are many things — many 



284 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT. " 

precious benefits — which we, by the very fact of our priva- 
tions, our lack of leisure and instruction, are not so likely to 
be aware of and take into our account. Those precious 
benefits form a chief part of what I may call the common 
estate of society : a wealth over and above buildings, ma- 
chinery, produce, shipping, and so on, though closely con- 
nected with these ; a wealth of a more delicate kind, that we 
may more unconsciously bring into danger, doing harm and 
not knowing that we do it. I mean that treasure of knowl- 
edge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, feeling, and 
manners, great memories and the interpretation of great 
records, which is carried on from the minds of one generation 
to the minds of another. This is something distinct from the 
indulgences of luxury and the pursuit of vain finery ; and one 
of the hardships in the lot of working men is that they have 
been for the most part shut out from sharing in this treasure. 
It can make a man's life very great, very full of delight, 
though he has no smart furniture and no horses : it also yields 
a great deal of discovery that corrects error, and of invention 
that lessens bodily pain, and must at least make life easier for all. 
Now the security of this treasure demands, not only the 
preservation of order, but a certain patience on our part with 
many institutions and facts of various kinds, especially touch- 
ing the accumulation of wealth, w r hich from the light we stand 
in, we are more likely to discern the evil than the good of. It 
is constantly the task of practical wisdom not to say, " This is 
good, and I will have it," but to say, " This is the less of two 
unavoidable evils, and I will bear it." And this treasure of 
knowledge, which consists in the fine activity, the exalted 
vision of many minds, is bound up at present with conditions 
which have much evil in them. Just as in the case of material 
wealth and its distribution we are obliged to take the selfish- 
ness and weaknesses of human nature into account, and how- 
ever we insist that men might act better, are forced, unless we 
are fanatical simpletons, to consider how they are likely to act ; 
so in this matter of the wealth that is carried in men's minds, 
we have to reflect that the too absolute predominance of a class 
whose wants have been of a common sort, who are chiefly 
struggling to get better and more food, clothing, shelter, and 
bodily recreation, may lead to hasty measures for the sake of 
having things more fairly shared, which, even if they did not 
fail of their object, would at last debase the life of the nation. 
Do anything which will throw the classes who hold the treas- 
ures of knowledge-— nay, I may say, the treasure of refined 



ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. 285 

needs— into the background, cause them to withdraw from 
public affairs, stop too suddenly any of the sources by which 
their leisure and ease are furnished, rob them of the chances 
by which they may be influential and pre-eminent, and you do 
something as short-sighted as the acts of France and Spain 
when in jealousy and wrath, not altogether unprovoked, they 
drove from among them races and classes that held the tradi- 
tions of handicraft and agriculture. You injure your own in- 
heritance and the inheritance of your children. You may truly 
say that this which I call the common estate of society has 
been anything but common to you ; but the same may be said, 
by many of us, of the sunlight and the air, of the sky and the 
fields, of parks and holiday games. Nevertheless that these 
blessings exist makes life worthier to us, and urges us the more 
to energetic, likely means of getting our share in them ; and I 
say, let us watch carefully, lest we do anything to lessen this 
treasure which is held in the minds of men, while we exert 
ourselves, first of all, and to the very utmost, that we and our - 
children may share in all its benefits. Yes ; exert ourselves to 
the utmost, to break the yoke of ignorance. If we demand 
more leisure, more ease in our lives, let us show that we don't 
deserve the reproach of wanting to shirk that industry which, 
in some form or other, every man, whether rich or poor, should 
feel himself as much bound to as he is bound to decency. Let 
us show that we want to have some time and strength left to 
us, that we may use it, not for brutal indulgence, but for the 
rational exercise of the faculties which make us mem AVithout 
this no political measures can benefit us. No political institu- 
tion will alter the nature of Ignorance, or hinder it from pro- 
ducing vice and misery. Let "ignorance start how it will, it 
must run the same round of low appetites, poverty, slavery, 
and superstition. Some of us know this well— nay, I will say, 
feel it ; for knowledge of this kind cuts deep ; and to us it is 
one of the most painful facts belonging to our condition that 
there are numbers of our fellow- workmen who are so far from 
feeling in the same wav, that they never use the imperfect ' 
opportunities already offered them for giving their children 
some schooling, but turn their little ones of tender age into 
bread-winners," often at cruel tasks, exposed to the horrible 
infection of childish vice. Of course, the causes of these 
hideous things go a long way back. Parents' misery has made 
parents' wickedness. But we, who are still blessed with the 
hearts of fathers and the consciences of men— we who have 
some knowledge of the curse entailed on broods of creatures in 



286 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE HLI&ft" 

human shape, whose enfeebled bodies and dull perverted minds 
are mere centres of uneasiness in whom even appetite is feeble 
and joy impossible — I say we are bound to use all the means 
at our command to help in putting a stop to this horror. 
Here, it seems to me, is a way in which we may use extended 
co-operation among us to the most momentous of all purposes, 
and make conditions of enrolment that would strengthen all 
educational measures. It is true enough that there is a low 
sense of parental duties in the nation at large, and that numbers 
who have no excuse in bodily hardship seem to think it a light 
thing to beget children, to bring human beings with all their 
tremendous possibilities into this difficult world, and then take 
little heed how they are disciplined and furnished for the 
perilous journey they are sent on without any asking of their 
own. This is a sin shared in more or less by all classes ; but 
there are sins which, like taxation, fall the heaviest on the 
poorest, and none have such galling reasons as we working 
men to try and rouse to the utmost the feeling of responsibility 
in fathers and mothers. We have been urged into co-opera- 
tion by the pressure of common demands. In war men need 
each other more ; and where a given point has to be defended, 
fighters inevitably find themselves shoulder to shoulder. So 
fellowship grows, so grow the rules of fellowship, which 
gradually shape themselves to thoroughness as the idea of a 
common good becomes more complete. We feel a right to 
say, If you will be one of us, you must make such and such a 
contribution — you must renounce such and such a separate 
advantage — you must set your face against such and such an 
infringement. If we have any false ideas about our common 
good, our rules will be wrong, and we shall be co-operating to 
damage each other. But, now, here is a part of our good, 
without which everything else we strive for will be worthless — 
I mean the rescue of our children. Let us demand from the 
members of our unions that they fulfil their duty as parents in 
this definite matter, which rules can reach. Let ns demand 
that they send their children to school, so as not to go on 
recklessly, breeding a moral pestilence among us, just as strictly 
as we demand that they pay their contributions to a common 
fund, understood to be for a common benefit. While we 
watch our public men, let us watch one another as to this duty, 
which is also public, and more momentous even than obedience 
to sanitary regulations. While we resolutely declare against 
the wickedness in high places, let us set ourselves also against 
the wickedness in low places, not quarrelling which came first, 



ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. 287 

or which is the worse of the two— not trying to settle the 
miserable precedence of plague or famine, but insisting un- 
flinchingly on remedies once ascertained, and summoning those 
who hold the treasure of knowledge to remember that they 
hold it in trust, and that with them lies the task of searching 
for new remedies, and finding the right methods of applying 
them. 

To find right remedies and right methods. Here is the 
great function of knowledge : here the life of one man may 
make a fresh era straight away, in which a sort of suffering that 
has existed shall exist no more. For the thousands of years 
down to the middle of the sixteenth century that human limbs 
had been hacked and amputated, nobody knew how to stop 
the bleeding except by searing the ends of the vessels with red- 
hot iron. "But then came a man named Ambrose Pare, and 
said, " Tie up the arteries !" That was a fine word to utter. 
It contained the statement of a method — a plan by which a 
particular evil was forever assuaged. Let us try to discern the 
men whose words carry that sort of kernel, and choose such 
men to be our guides and representatives — not choose platform 
swaggerers, who bring us nothing but the ocean to make our 
broth with. 

To get the chief power into the hands of the wisest, which 
means to get our life regulated according to the truest prin- 
ciples mankind is in possession of, is a problem as old as 
the very notion of wisdom. The solution comes slowly, 
because men collectively can only be made to embrace prin- 
ciples, and to act on them, by the slow stupendous teaching of 
the world's events. Men will go on planting potatoes, and 
nothing else but potatoes, till a potato disease comes and 
forces them to find out the advantage of a varied crop. 
Selfishness, stupidity, sloth, persist in trying to adapt the 
world to their desires, till a time comes when the world 
manifests itself as too decidedly inconvenient to them. ^ Wis- 
dom stands outside of man and urges itself upon him, like the 
marks of the changing seasons, before it finds a home within 
him, directs his actions, and from the precious effects of 
obedience begets a corresponding love. 

But while still outside of us, wisdom often looks terrible, 
and wears strange forms, wrapped in the changing conditions 
of a struggling world. It wears now the form of wants and 
just demands in a great multitude of British men : wants and 
demands urged into existence by the forces of a maturing 
world. And it is in virtue of this — in virtue of this presence 



288 THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT. 

of wisdom on our side as a mighty fact, physical and moral, 
which must enter into and shape the thoughts and actions of 
maukind — that we working- men have obtained the suffrage. 
Not because we are an excellent multitude, but because we are 
a needy multitude. 

But now, for our own part, we have seriously to consider 
this outside wisdom which lies in the supreme unalterable 
nature of things, and watch to give it a home within us and 
obey it. If the claims of the unendowed multitude of working 
men hold within them principles which must shape the future, 
it is not less true that the endowed classes, in their inheritance 
from the past, hold the precious material without which no 
worthy, noble future can be moulded. Many of the highest 
uses of life are in their keeping ; and if privilege has often 
been abused, it has also been the nurse of excellence. Here 
again we have to submit ourselves to the great law of inheri- 
tance. If we quarrel with the way in which the labors and 
earnings of the past have been preserved and handed down, 
we are just as bigoted, just as narrow, just as wanting in that 
religion which keeps an open ear and an obedient mind to the 
teachings of fact, as we accuse those of being, who quarrel 
with the new truths and new needs which are disclosed in the 
present. The deeper insight we get into the causes of human 
trouble, and the ways by which men are made better and 
happier, the less we shall be inclined to the unprofitable spirit 
and practice of reproaching classes as such in a wholesale 
fashion. Not all the evils of our condition are such as we can 
justly blame others for ; and, I repeat, many of them are such 
as no changes of institutions can quickly remedy. To discern 
between the evils that energy can remove and the evils that 
patience must bear, makes the difference between manliness 
and childishness, between good sense and folly. And more 
than that, without such discernment, seeing that we have grave 
duties toward our own body and the country at large, we can 
hardly escape acts of fatal rashness and injustice. 

I am addressing a mixed assembly of workmen, and some of 
you may be as well or better fitted than I am to take up this 
office. But they will not think it amiss in me that I have tried 
to bring together the considerations most likely to be of service 
to us in preparing ourselves for the use of our new oppor- 
tunities. I have avoided touching on special questions. The 
best help toward judging well on these is to approach them in 
the right temper without vain expectation, and with a resolu- 
tion which is mixed with temperance. 



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